Fix it

The events at the BBC are quite extraordinary, yet somehow depressingly predictable.
Obviously many people are shocked by the allegations made about Jimmy Saville, but they are still allegations. They are being investigated by the police, and if he were alive one can be sure that his lawyers would have been issuing injunctions by now to suppress some of the press coverage in the hope of ensuring that he got a fair trial.
Perhaps because he is dead, perhaps because there are so many allegations, perhaps because some people did find him "creepy", we seem to have forgotten the need for due process.
Unfortunately what seems to have happened next is that the lack of normal process in the Saville case has led the media into a frenzy of thinking that trial by media is OK. That is is reasonable to put unsubstantiated allegations on TV, or repeat them on TV and in the media, without due process.
Whatever the truth of any of these allegations it will be a very bad thing if we abandon due process.
I'm not a lawyer, in fact I have to say that lawyers mostly annoy me, there are too many of them, they charge too much and they seem to promote a narrow view of the world. Nevertheless there are good reasons why we have a police force, a crown prosecution service, courts, juries and judges, and they are all independent of each other in a system that has evolved over centuries. TV programmes and newspapers and the internet are not a substitute.
The legal process may get things wrong from time to time, but if it does, there are appeals and mechanisms to secure redress. If we resort to the media and the Internet as an alternative, there is no appeal or redress and we will end up with a much more unfair society. We have only to look at the tragic cases of people killing themselves because they have been attacked on the web to see the extremes that are possible. As a society I'm sure we don't need more of that sort of thing, and I am prepared to put up with a few lawyers in order to ensure that.
If Jimmy Saville's alleged activities, and the fall out from revelations about them, end up undermining a fair society as well as apparently abusing children, then he really will have fixed us.

No fear

A woman from Iowa has no fear, because she has damage to her Amygdala. For those of you who did not study the anatomy of the brain, that is a chunk of grey matter deep in your brain. There are two amydaloid bodies, one on each side a few inches back from your eyes. It has been known for some time that it is associated with emotional learning.

Following the press reports we find that this woman has no fear and apparently as a result has been in several life threatening escapades, from which we are told she is lucky to have emerged alive.

So what this tells us is that being fearful has survival advantages, it is OK to be scared. Actually, that is pretty obvious, I guess. If being scared had no purpose, it is hard to see how it would have survived as a human trait.

I am reminded of that little poem by Piet Hein, (he called them grooks).

To be brave is to behave

bravely when your heart is faint.

So you can be really brave

only when you really ain't.

There is speculation in several of the reports that this knowledge might somehow lead to a cure for fear, or possibly for PTSD. You have to love our media; first they tell us the woman is lucky to be alive and that having no fear has almost killed her. So what do they conclude? That a drug to get rid of fear would be a good idea. Can I suggest that it ought to be tried out on reporters and editors first?

Friends can make you Liberal

I listened to a piece on the Today programme that said scientists had discovered a liberal gene. I spent about 20 minutes lazily hunting around on Google and read ten different stories in a variety of media across the globe that repeated the same general conclusion.

So, it must be true. Wrong.

It took another 15 minutes to find the actual paper – by finding the CV of the lead author and then picking up a reference to the paper from there. Read it yourself at:-

http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/friends_drd4_and_political_ideology.pdf

One has to ask, if it took me less than half an hour to find the actual paper and another 10 minutes to read it, how come so much of the world’s media got it wrong? The paper specifically says it has not found a liberal gene.

“there is not a direct association between the 7R allele and ideology.” And “We do not claim that this evidence proves a causal relationship between DRD4 (that’s the gene) and political ideology.”

It’s hard to be much clearer than that. What they do show is that if you have the particular gene and you have a lot of friends, then you are more likely to be liberal. They also show that the gene does not make you more likely to have friends.

“The results of these tests indicate that 7R alleles have no significant effect on the number of friends, and no direct impact on ideology. Only the interaction is significant.”

The other thing that the reports don’t mention is “While our finding is statistically significant, the strength of the association is quite small.”

So, the gene does not make you liberal, nor does it make you have more friends. But if you do have the gene and you happen to have more friends then you are a little bit more likely to be liberal. In other words, it is the friends that may make you liberal.

Would a headline “Friends may make you liberal.” have bounced around the world’s media?

What is the message for died in the wool conservatives? Don’t have friends or you might become liberal?

The comparable message for Liberals would be. “Make friends with a conservative – it may really screw them up.”

There is one snag, the paper also make clear that all this gene/friend interaction has to take place in adolescence.

So the real message, to liberals, is:- Get your kids to play with conservative’s kids. Putting it another way - letting kids make friends is a subversive activity. That would have been a much more interesting headline.