Music on the brain

There was a nice conference on ‘music and the brain’ here in London last weekend, and I have a report on it on Nature News. Here’s the longer version.

The emotions teeming inside the works of the Romantic composers may have neurological explanations, as a recent meeting explored.

It’s not hard to understand why Robert Schumann should have been selected as the focus of a meeting called 'The Musical Brain', which took place last weekend in London [1]. Not only is the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s birth, but his particular ‘musical brain’ gives neuroscientists plenty to think about.

For one thing, Schumann suffered from the neurological condition called focal dystonia – a loss of muscle control that afflicts an estimated 1 in 100 professional musicians and ended Schumann’s hopes to be a concert pianist. And he seems also to have struggled with severe bipolar disorder, which apparently dictated the rhythm of his creativity and left him confined to an asylum for the last two years of his life.

Focal dystonia is sometimes called ‘musician’s cramp’, but it is not primarily a muscular problem: it begins in the brain [2]. As neuroscientist Jessica Grahn of Cambridge University explained, it stems from the way intense musical practice can over-inflate the mental representation of the relevant part of the body (usually the fingers, although it can affect lip control in brass players). Once the neural representations of the fingers overlap, they can no longer be controlled independently.

This typically manifests itself as a stiffening or curling-up of some fingers. The American pianist Leon Fleisher lost the use of his right hand in this way in 1963, and was restricted for decades to the repertoire for left hand only (much of it written for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who lost his right arm in World War I). Although dystonia is a consequence of over-practice (or as Fleisher says, inappropriate practice techniques), there may also be a genetic predisposition to it – it is more common, for example, among men. It’s precisely because it is a neural rather than a muscle problem that dystonia is so hard to treat, and indeed there is still no genuine cure.

Schumann succumbed to this excruciating condition in his right middle finger at the age of 21 [3]. He used a home-made contraption to stretch the finger, but it may have done more harm than good. He even composed an extremely difficult piece, his Toccata Opus 7, that avoids the use of the middle finger entirely (hear it here). ‘I was hoping to convince someone to play it at the meeting’, says Grahn, ‘but it’s a bear, so no luck.’

With his performing career stalled, Schumann focused on composing – which, according to neuroscientist Eckart Alternmüller, a specialist on focal dystonia, was for us ‘a blessing, because it allowed his creative talent to be developed to masterful perfection’ [3]. But that was probably little consolation to poor Schumann, particularly as things got far worse for him. Towards the end of his life, he heard voices and was tormented by visions of angels and demons. Fearful that he might harm his wide Clara, in 1854 he attempted to drown himself in the Rhine, only to be rescued by boatmen. That was when he voluntarily entered the asylum where he stayed until his death.

Not everyone agrees that Schumann was bipolar: a recent biographer John Worthen argues that he exhibited no serious mental disturbance until the end of his life, when his psychological disintegration could have been caused by tertiary syphilis [4]. Alternatively, it has been argued that Schumann’s final ‘madness’ looks like a case of mercury poisoning, caused by the mercury medication then used to treat syphilis. But psychiatrist (and concert pianist) Richard Kogan has argued that Schumann’s well documented spells of wild creativity and sleeplessness interspersed with periods of lethargy look like a classic case of bipolar disorder.

If so, he is by no means unique among composers in wrestling with mental illness: Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Leonard Bernstein all seem to have done so. All of which raises the question whether we can hear the emotional turmoil in what they wrote. It’s not hard to imagine so: music critic Stephen Johnson, who introduced the life and work of Schumann at the meeting (and also has bipolar disorder), says of Schumann’s fiendish Toccata that ‘it seems exuberant, it seems it’s flying and it’s very exciting – but it’s breathless, it’s on the edge of something frightening.’

It’s not obvious, however, that we should infer a composer’s state of mind from the music. The German composer Paul Hindemith felt that, if we believed that, the leaps of emotional tone classical compositions often exhibit would compel us to be diagnosing mental disorder all the time, while even the febrile Tchaikovsky doubted that composers express their mood at the actual moment of composition. Take Mozart’s wickedly playful A Musical Joke (K.522): it was apparently the first piece he composed after his father died.

But nonetheless there can be no doubt that music does express emotion – indeed, it is one of the most powerful emotional vehicles in all of human creativity, which seems to be one reason why it can be so effective in therapeutic contexts. It was an interest in the use of music in learning and therapy, says music psychologist Katie Overy of Edinburgh University, ‘that forced me to get into the emotional aspects’.

While acknowledging that musical expression is multi-faceted, she argues that current neurological studies suggest that the activation of mirror neurons – ‘empathy circuits’ that fire both when we watch another person perform an action and when we perform it ourselves – offer a clue about how music works [5].

It may be, she says, that when we hear music, we can ‘read’ it as we would read indicators of emotional state in another person’s vocal or physical gestures. ‘Happy’ music is typically up-tempo and high-pitched, while ‘calm’ or ‘sad’ music tends to be soft, slow and low-pitched [6], because of the way these acoustic qualities mimic the actions and voices of people in those emotional states – an observation that seems to hold across cultures, as Stefan Koelsch of Sussex University, another speaker at the meeting, and his coworkers have shown recently [7].

‘Music has the capacity to tap into these qualities and expand on them’, says Overy. Pianist Ian Brown illustrated during her talk how, for example, musical expressivity involves the mimicry of singing with legato (smoothly connected notes) and speech-like phrasing. The composer and performer can then add to this effect by deploying culture-specific structures (such as major/minor keys; see here) or unexpected rhythms and harmonies: Koelsch showed that musical ‘surprises’ can elicit the same neurological signals as other types of surprise [8].

In this respect, then, support may be emerging for the suggestion of philosopher Susanne Langer that music mimics the dynamics of emotion itself – or, as psychologist Carroll Pratt put it in 1931, that ‘music sounds the way emotions feel’.

References
1. The Musical Brain: Arts, Science and the Mind, St John’s Smith Square, London, 2-3 October 2010.
2. E. Altenmüller & H.-C. Jabusch, J. Hand Therapy 22, 144-155 (2009).
3. E. Altenmüller, in J. Bogousslavsky & F. Boller (eds), Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists (Karger, Basel, 2005).
4. J. Worthen, Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007).
5. I. Molnar-Szakacs & K. Overy, SCAN 1, 235-241 (2006).
6. L. L. Balkwill & W. F. Thompson, Music Perception 17, 43-64 (1999).
7. T. Fritz et al., Curr. Biol. 19, 1-4 (2009).
8. S. Koelsch, T. Frtiz & G. Schlaug, NeuroReport 19, 1815-1819 (2008).

The Corrections

Somehow I suspect that Jonathan Franzen doesn’t need me to feel his pain. But all the same, I do. He has just demanded the shredding of something like 80,000 copies of the UK edition of his book Freedom because the wrong version of the proofs was used for the final printing, containing lots of little typos and omissions of corrections. Several reviewers have admitted that they’d never have noticed the difference, but that’s not the point. It’s not so much about perfectionism as a kind of pride. I have never, like Franzen, taken nine years to write a book, and I don’t have the ability, and probably not the inclination, to choose words as carefully and precisely as he evidently does. But all the same, I know that errors introduced in the production process feel like a two-year-old has just scribbled over your pages – like mindless or wilful destruction. I know this is unfair – no one in the production process is trying to do other than perform their job well – but that’s how it feels. What is particularly galling is that, unless you’re Franzen, one these errors have happened, you’re stuck with them forever. It arouses that childhood feeling of a terrible injustice that you are utterly powerless to rectify. And it happens in the swanky hardback version, the version that is meant (unlike the paperback) to be an object of beauty. There are one or two pages of my previous books that I still mustn’t look at for fear that I’ll start fuming all over again.

There have been times when I have been driven to conclude that, if you leave typesetters the slightest opening for introducing a mistake, they’ll seize it. Many times I have said to myself that I would in future always insist on seeing the final, final version of the proofs before they go off for printing, only to feel, when the time came, that this would seem just too much like the neurotic author – and then to regret not doing so. It does amaze me that typesetters will interpret letters in handwritten proof corrections in such a way as to turn a perfectly obvious and ordinary word into gibberish – sometimes you can’t help feeling they are just having a laugh. And publishers often seem to feel no need to double-check corrections, or so it seems. Oh, I’m sure typesetters must be confronted with some real nightmares sometimes – pages covered in wild scribbles connected by a maze of looping arrows. I have occasionally done them no favours myself. But there just don’t seem to be enough checks built into the publishing process, which seems bizarre given how tough it is to get a book published and how cautious publishers have become about commissioning.

I exempt my current publisher, Bodley Head, from these criticisms – not simply to keep them sweet, but because they are undoubtedly the most careful and conscientious I have ever worked with. Of course, that is inviting trouble, especially with a stack of proof corrections sitting on my desk right now (February 2011, since you ask). And worse: when I read that the typesetter for Franzen’s book was a company called Palimpsest, it rang a bell. So I checked out my own pages… yup.

Return to Chartres

About 18 months ago I went to Chartres for the filming of a documentary about the Gothic cathedrals for Nova. The documentary is now finished, and airs in October in the US. I’ve no idea how it ended up, but there is an outtake available here which bodes well. I’m glad they managed to find a use for this footage, since it wasn’t easy taking it: up in the galleries we had to keep persuading the organist to postpone his practice, while out on the front steps we had to placate the resident alcoholics and grab takes between rain squalls. I’d frozen my gonads off by the end of it. That, no doubt, is all very thirteenth-century.

The prospect for October

Here’s the full-cream version of my Lab Report for Prospect in October.

The IPCC is in a bind. There are good arguments for reforming the way it operates, not least improving the efficiency and transparency of its review process. A recent independent assessment by the InterAcademy Council, representing all the world’s major science academies, agreed with that but concluded that the IPCC’s scientific conclusions are reliable and that it has generally worked well on a shoestring. But should its chair, Rajendra Pachauri, stay? Pachauri has been pilloried for errors that led to unjustified forecasts about melting of the Himalayan glaciers – a bad mistake, but negligible in the grand scheme. He has also been unjustly smeared over alleged conflicts of interest. There is nothing here to warrant resignation

But Pachauri’s leadership during the IPCC’s tribulations of the past year has not been inspiring, and more to the point, all leaders grow stale eventually. A change could bring fresh vigour and restore public confidence. Yet such is the aura of distrust fomented by the smear campaign that it would now be all but impossible for Pachauri to step down without being seen to validate climate sceptics’ criticisms. We are now in a mirror-image reality in which some consider Bjorn Lomborg’s U-turn on the threat of climate change more principled than Pachauri’s steadfast advocacy of the science. A reformed IPCC would be welcome, but there will be no winners.

Although it’s perhaps no surprise that the restoration of federal funding for stem-cell research in the United States under the Obama administration is not plain sailing, no one could have foreseen the oddness of the latest, potentially devastating obstacle. The injunction issued by a district court judge in Columbia against such funding stems from a case brought not by Christian ‘pro-life’ groups, who object to the destruction of human embryos in harvesting new stem-cell lines, but by two stem-cell scientists. James Sherley and Theresa Deisher work on adult stem cells and oppose research on embryonic cells, saying that the adult-cell work is both scientifically and ethically superior.

Outsiders to the US legal system will be baffled that a district judge can, by reinterpreting the meaning of a long-standing constraint on embryonic stem-cell work, force the National Institutes of Health instantly to freeze all funding, plunging work in progress into limbo and ensuring funding chaos months or years down the line. But there it is: Chief Judge Royce Lamberth has decided that the 1996 Dickey-Wicker Amendment to NIH budget legislation, prohibiting funding for research involving the creation and destruction of embryos, in fact must prohibit all embryonic stem-cell work whether or not it destroys or creates embryos. The injunction has been appealed by the US Department of Justice.

The amendment itself is probably here to stay, since it impinges also on abortion, but the current Obama policy had left room for the use, with donor consent, of embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise be destroyed.

Sherley is a complicated character with an agenda that is hard to read. But the fact that a maverick case in a district court can wreck an entire nation’s research effort at the forefront of medical science is chilling.

Because every month now seems to bring a new complete genome sequence – now mouse-ear cress, now the panda – it might have been tempting at first to greet the announcement of the wheat genome with a touch of ennui. But no longer. Drought and flood have devastated wheat yields in Russia and China. Russia, one of the world’s biggest producers, has now imposed an export ban that has sent wheat prices soaring, threatening the food security of millions of people. The riots in Mozambique over bread prices may be just a taste of what is to come.

This is why the wheat genome sequence is one of the most important so far, and why public access to the data granted by the researchers, led by a team at Liverpool University, is so valuable and commendable. The genetic information should point to shortcuts for breeding of new, hardier varieties, as well as identifying specific genes that might be engineered to improve resistance to drought and disease.

            Why, then, has wheat not been genetically sequenced sooner? The answer is sobering: the genome is not only larger than that of most crops, but is five times larger than the human genome. And some scientists have cautioned that the British work offers just a preliminary first draft: the International Wheat Genome Sequence Consortium says that there is still a lot of work to be done in sorting and ordering the raw data.

The much-vaunted medical benefits of sequencing the human genome itself have just received some vindication from the results of clinical trials of the anti-cancer drug PLX4032. The dramatic potential of the drug for shrinking skin-cancer tumours was reported in August, and is confirmed by a recent paper in Nature. But the real excitement stems from the approach: the drug was developed to target a specific carcinogenic mutation of a gene called BRAF, involved in cell growth. The problem is that there are several dangerous mutations of BRAF alone, and thousands of other genetic mutations that also cause cancer. But the new results show that targeting a particular mutation can be highly effective, hitting only those cancer cells that possess it instead of employing the scattershot attack of current cancer chemotherapies. If many mutant-specific drugs come online, rapid gene profiling of patients could enable them to be given precisely the right treatment, without the debilitating side-effects. That, however, will require the development of an awful lot of new drugs. [See my Prospect article on the problems with Big Pharma.]

Grand designs?

My review of Hawking’s new book has now been published, although you’re unlikely to stumble across it unless you live in Abu Dhabi. Since it is published pretty much verbatim, and seems to be freely accessible, I won’t post it again here.

God, the universe, and selling books

I have a comment on the Prospect blog about the way the media has been hyperventilating (see here and here (Graham Farmelo being characteristically astute) and here) about Stephen Hawking. Here is how it started out. [Incidentally, I can't figure out why my last paragraphs are reverting to Roman typeface. Sorry for this distraction.]

It’s a harsh reality of journalistic life that you will sometimes have to write up ‘news’ that is neither new nor significant, simply because your editor knows that everyone else will do so. That is the generous interpretation of the blanket media coverage of Stephen Hawking’s pronouncement that God is no longer needed to create the universe.

Hawking has form in this arena, having previously been accorded oracular status when he uttered some comment about a Theory of Everything permitting us to ‘know the Mind of God’, the kind of idle metaphor that only someone lacking any serious interest in the interface of science and religion would employ. Hawking clearly had not read Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, which wisely declares that ‘if any man think, by his inquiries after material things, to discover the nature or will of God, he is indeed spoiled by vain philosophy.’ Although interpretations of Bacon’s pieties as those of a closet atheist minding his back are unlikely, he did at least have the good taste thus to dispense with God at the outset.

Let’s not be too harsh on Hawking: the man is one of the best physicists in the world. The problem is that, in the public view, this statement probably seems as absurd as saying that Messi is a good striker: a lame way of acknowledging incomparable genius. Most people will be astonished to hear that Hawking is not rated by his peers among the top ten physicists even of the 20^th century, let alone of all time. They probably imagine he has so far been denied a Nobel prize out of sheer jealousy. Hawking is extremely smart, but so are others, and he is a long way from being Einstein’s successor.

More importantly, Hawking has no reputation among scientists as a deep thinker. There is nothing especially profound in what he has said to date about the social and philosophical implications of science in general and cosmology in particular. There is far more wisdom in the views of Martin Rees, John Barrow or Phil Anderson, not to mention the old favourites Einstein, Bohr and Feynman. Hawking’s latest remarks on the redundancy of God have little depth, as Paul Davies showed easily enough in the Guardian: if you have any kind of law-like regularity in the universe, the door is always open for those who like to attribute it to God. And Mary Warnock (no religious apologist) points out – or reminds us that Hume pointed out – that the Biblical God is not simply or even primarily a God who made the universe. It’s a sterile debate, as Bacon already saw.

This makes it ridiculous, then, that Hawking’s announcement in his new book The Grand Design (I’m currently reviewing this, and will post the review shortly) has been greeted as though it is the final judgement of science on the Biblical Creation: Hawking Has Spoken. Even atheists must feel some sympathy for the likes of Rowan Williams having to comment on such a shallow assertion, as though Hawking is supposed to have set the foundations of their faith quaking. Hawking is speaking about the God of Boyle and Newton, not the God of contemporary theology. (This is not to deny that millions still believe in this anachronistic, childish vision of God, who waved his fingers and made the world, but just to say that it is a bit silly to pander to it.)

So why does Hawking get awarded this status by the idolatory press? It’s time to stop being squeamish and take the bull by the horns. The Cult of Hawking is the Cult of the Great Mind in the Useless Body. It is attributable in part to a simple, ghoulish fascination with the man’s physical disability, but more so (and more troublingly) to the unspoken astonishment that a man with such severe bodily impairment can be intelligent. It speaks volumes about our persistent prejudices about disability.

I find it disturbing that the media plays along with this so readily, even while now seemingly keen to feign blindness to Hawking’s condition. It is hard to know whether Hawking recognizes this situation himself. He has always seemed inspiringly stoical, even gently self-mocking, in the face of the extreme challenges of his affliction. If he knows that his fame and reputation stem from his illness, no one has any right to expect him to comment on it. But as for the rest of us: the more we turn Hawking into a guru, the more we do a disservice to everyone else whose minds are vibrant while their bodies are impaired.

Happy now?

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News.

**********

Does money make you happy? It depends what you mean by happy.

You want to be happy? Here’s how: be highly educated, female, wealthy, not middle-aged (tell me about it), married and self-employed. These are among the most salient characteristics of people who describe themselves as being the most happy. Misery, meanwhile, comes from unemployment, low income, divorce and poor health.

Not rocket science, is it? Nevertheless, the booming discipline of ‘happiness studies’ continues to excite controversy. What is cause and effect, for example? Are people happier when they marry, or do happy people marry?

And what exactly do we mean by happiness: that we laugh a lot, feel optimistic and secure in our lives, are serenely calm or deliriously hedonistic? In a recent Gallup poll of national happiness, the USA came fifth, and yet at the same time came 89^th from ‘best’ (out of 151) in terms of ‘worry’ and had the fifth highest stress levels. How to make sense of that? Does happiness compensate for stress, or are they ineluctably conjoined?

Besides, is happiness a desirable goal? That might seem obvious (it was to the authors of the US Declaration of Independence) – and it surely seems a better measure of human wealth than conventional ‘well-being’ economic indices such as GDP. But what if a happy nation is a selfish or profligate one? And who’s to say that the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would not, blissed out by the drug soma, have rated high on the happiness scale?

These dilemmas have deep roots. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian political philosophy in the nineteenth century sought to arrange for the maximum happiness for the greatest number of people, according to a so-called ‘hedonistic calculus’: a principle, however, rendered indeterminate by what has been called the ‘fallacy of double optima’, with no unique optimum.

One of the most contested issues is the relationship between happiness and income. Everyone agrees that abject poverty is miserable, but how does the relationship play out above that unfortunate state? While being female or married are all-or-nothing factors, income is quantitative: if being wealthy makes you happy, does being more wealthy make you more happy?

Since most of us are, by definition, not relatively wealthy in our society, we probably feel a glow of self-righteous satisfaction from studies suggesting there is a ‘wealth threshold’ above which happiness no longer increases [1][2]. That fits with intuition: the super-rich do not strike us as a particularly joyful bunch. (In the UK we like to wheel on the Royal Family as the prime exhibit, disregarding the fact that less representative members of society you will never find.)

But now Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Angus Deaton at Princeton University have thrown a cat among the pigeons. In a new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA [3] they use the US data from the recent Gallup survey to argue that income does continue to impact on our evaluation of life satisfaction as we enter the realm of the rich.

Does this validate the anonymous quip that those who say money can’t buy happiness don’t know where to shop? Not exactly. Kahneman and Deaton say that previous discussions have been muddied by a failure to distinguish a sense of emotional well-being from our life evaluation. The first refers to daily experience: how much we laugh, how relaxed we feel as we go about our life. The second is a more objective overview: are we content with our family, job, house, insurance, credit rating? It is not hard to imagine the head of a big corporation feeling good about all this while never cracking a grin.

The Gallup poll surveyed more than 700,000 US residents, although Kahneman and Deaton jettison about a quarter of the responses because they appear unreliable. From the rest, they deduce that income is more closely correlated with life evaluation than with emotional well-being, and that this correlation persists for all income levels, at least up to around $160,000 per annum. While reported well-being also generally increases with income, this relationship plateaus at an income of around $75,000.

For all their ambiguities, happiness studies are closely monitored by politicians and policy makers, not least because policies that make people happy seem likely to win votes. What will they make of these findings? Is it better to promote good life evaluation, or emotional well-being?

Kahneman and Deaton refrain from taking a position – and the richness and subtlety of their data advise against glib answers. As they imply, any society should wish to improve the lot of people who have poor emotional health and are gloomy about their prospect. But their results, while complicating the previous picture, surely suggest that income (and dare one therefore add, taxation levels?) should not be regarded as a relevant happiness dial for the comfortably off. While some might be determined to extract the conclusion that, as the New York Times once put it [4], ‘maybe money does buy happiness after all’, there is a strong case here that better education, secure health provision, lowering of stress, and the nurturing of social and familial relationships offer a far greater dividend of smiles.

  

References

1. Easterlin, R. A. in Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz (eds P. A. David & M. W. Reder) 89-124 (Academic Press, New York, 1974). Paper available here.

2. Layard, R. Happiness: Lessons From a New Science (Penguin, New York, 2005).

3. Kahneman, D. & Deaton, A. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi: 10.1073/pnas.1011492107.

4. Leonhardt, D. New York Times 16 April (2008).

The prospect for September

Bit of overmatter from my Prospect Lab Report this month, as the top story below blew up shortly before it went to press, so the last two stories below were shelved. Here, as ever, is the unexpurgated version.

It would be nice to be able to report that the much trumpeted ‘end of antibiotics’ is just a slice of media alarmism. But it isn’t. The danger that just about all our existing antibiotics will soon be powerless against resistant bacteria, as claimed in Lancet Infectious Diseases, is all too real. A paper in the journal reports the emergence and spread of strains of common pathogens, such as E. coli and the pneumonia bug K. pneumoniae, containing a gene that confers resistance against even current last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems. Such bacteria, Chris Walsh of Harvard Medical School confirms, “are on the brink of being impossible to treat with existing antibiotics.” “This is a very serious problem”, agrees Gerry Wright, a specialist in antibiotic resistance and discovery at McMaster University in Ontario. Without antibiotics, even routine surgery could cause fatal infections.

Antibiotic resistance has been with us ever since penicillin revolutionized medicine. So why the problem now? Partly, it’s simply becoming harder to find new drugs to expand the arsenal. But the difficulties also stem from practices within the pharmaceutical industry. “This is a very grim time in antibacterial drug development”, says Wright. “The reasons are complex, but the fact that many pharmaceutical companies have moved to a focus on chronic diseases is one.”

Wright is one of several specialists who have been clamouring for years about the danger. In 2004, Carl Nathan of Cornell University’s Weill Medical College decried the way companies look for profitable blockbuster antibiotics. These are general-purpose drugs for chronic infections, and their widespread use quickly elicits resistance. But if their use is restrained, profits fall and funding and expertise leaches away. This, along with regulatory hurdles, the debilitating effects of a spate of big pharma mergers, and myopic focus on hitting tried-and-tested biochemical targets in the pathogens, has now almost dried up the antibiotic development pipeline. Nathan called for an overhaul in the way new antibiotics are sought and brought to market, including a vigorous not-for-profit pharmaceutical sector.

Something certainly needs to change: this is a global problem for which the market may not offer any solution. “Multidrug resistant bacteria will only continue to spread”, says Wright. “There is no chance that the problem will go away.”

*****

The UK coalition government’s plan to dismantle the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority in its cull of ‘health quangos’ is nothing short of vandalism.

The Health Protection Agency, also on the hit list, supplies vital advice about infectious diseases to the government, public and medical profession. But that demands rather specific expertise which could at least conceivably be transferred intact within the civil service. The HFEA is different.

Set up in 1991 after much governmental procrastination in the wake of the first IVF birth (1978) and the subsequent Warnock Report (1984) on embryo research, its responsibilities ballooned as developments in embryology and assisted conception accelerated. The authority’s recent wrestling with the ethics of human-animal hybrid embryos and stem-cell research seems a long way from treatments for infertility, but there is an inextricable link between them, historically and scientifically. This is one reason why the possible plan floated by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to parcel out the HFEA’s work to three other bodies is naïve and potentially dangerous. Decisions about these delicate matters at the forefront of reproductive and biomedical technology require a comprehensive overview of the context, and ever more so as time goes by.

The real tragedy is that the HFEA did its job so well, as attested by the fact that it managed to upset both religious (and secular) conservatives, for perceived liberalism, and scientists, for alleged restrictiveness (despite the UK having one of the most permissive embryo research frameworks in the world). The HFEA was genuinely independent, refusing to kowtow to government, scientists, IVF clinics, religious groups, or public opinion. Doubtless some of its decisions could be criticized, but they were always taken with sober, informed consideration. It was a bulwark against the hazards of both a laissez-faire free market in infertility treatment and knee-jerk reactionary prohibition. It will be a miracle if the same acumen can be assembled from the scattered remains.  

*****

The announcement of an antiviral vaginal gel that can reduce HIV infection by around 50 percent is good news, however qualified. The current clinical trial, conducted by the Durban-based Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, is modest in scale and awaits replication, along with more data on safety and a better understanding of why it doesn’t always succeed. But the great virtue of this strategy is that it gives some autonomy to women, who can reduce their chance of contracting the virus when male sexual partners refuse to use a condom. In South Africa, a third of all women between 20 and 34 are thought to be HIV-positive, and they account for around 60% of all new infections.

The gel contains an antiviral drug which interferes with a key enzyme involved in viral replication, unlike previous efforts which have sought either to inhibit the entry of viruses into cells or to kill the viruses (or infected cells) directly. Testing on 889 HIV-negative women over two years showed that regular use could reduce the chance of infection by 54%. The gel should be very cheap per dose and has few side-effects. The question now is how to balance the urgency of need against time-consuming confirmation and in-depth clinical testing.

There was more promising news with the announcement that two ‘therapeutic vaccines’ for HIV – which aim to prevent transmission from infected people rather than preventing infection in the first place – have at last shown some success in boosting immune systems debilitated by HIV. The vaccines use pieces of RNA from the virus to stimulate an immune response.

Many AIDS researchers had concluded that therapeutic vaccines would not work, and even now the response to the new trials, which report only a modest suppression of the virus, is somewhat muted. Some fear the strategy might backfire by boosting evasive viral mutations.

*****

It’s a good time to be an oil specialist: lucrative contracts beckon both from BP and from the US government as they prepare for the obligatory Natural Resource Damage Assessment. But there are strings attached in either case: you probably won’t be able to publish your research for confidentiality reasons. Some academics have already declined offers for this reason. There is of course nothing very usual about gag rules for work contracted by a private company or for government-backed research with legal implications. But it could mean that, in the absence of significant independent funding for such research, a detailed understanding of the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill will never be made public.

On the other hand, oil clean-up technology could be improved by the carrot of a $1.4 million prize dangled by the X Prize Foundation, a Californian organization that aims to stimulate “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity”. The company has previously offered a $10 million award for the development of a privately funded, manned spacecraft, which was claimed by the company Scaled Composites now working on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercial spaceflight programme. Entries for the oil prize are already being prepared. It’s good that the Foundation has noticed there are better ways to spend its money.

In search of beauty

In his review of my trio of books Nature’s Patterns in the TLS, Martin Kemp makes a start on a question that I leave more or less untouched: the issue of our subjective experience of pattern and form. Why do we respond aesthetically to pattern and order? Or to put it simplistically but, in the end, in the form that perhaps really counts: why do we find snowflakes and flowers beautiful?

That’s the issue psychologist Nicholas Humphrey tackles in an ambitious article in the current Prospect. More specifically, he asks why we apprehend beauty both in art and in nature. He seeks an answer in evolutionary psychology. And guess what: he finds it. He believes that ultimately an appreciation of beauty has its origin in sexual selection, much as Darwin anticipated. Beautiful works, he says, bear the hallmarks of human skill that offer signals of reproductive fitness: dexterity, intellectual ability, sensory acuity, perhaps even morality.

But why do we then find nature beautiful too, when there is no maker? Partly, says Humphrey, this is a question of convergence: we find traits in animals beautiful (such as butterfly wings) because the courtship displays of other animals are akin to those of humans. And partly, it is the result of the way we habitually personify inanimate nature, believing that it does indeed have a maker, and that this maker should therefore be the object of our love.

Now, let’s be fair: experience of beauty, and judgements of beauty in art, are so diverse that just about any attempt to explain them in biological and evolutionary terms is likely to be vulnerable. But just about every statement in Humphrey’s piece is open to challenge. It is hard to know where to start.

Probably the most serious problem for his thesis is that it is so culturally biased. Humphrey seems to assume that all cultures find beauty in the same places: that making visual art, music and literature is always primarily about making beauty, and that we all agree on it when we see it. But it is hotly debated whether, say, the primary function of music in some cultures is an aesthetic one at all. (Without culturally agreed points of common reference, it can be very hard to say.) Humphrey’s notion of what art is and what it strives to do seems solidly located within the Western Renaissance tradition.

The sexual selection idea seems kind of plausible, but no more than others. Certainly that’s the case for music, as I discussed in The Music Instinct. And like so much evolutionary psychology, not only is this idea not put to the test, but its proponents seem wholly unconcerned even to think about how that might be done. Is musical prowess an honest signal of survival skills, for instance? There seems to be no evidence for that (and sometimes evidence to the contrary). And what are the relevant skills? How does art demonstrate ‘loyalty’, for example, as Humphrey suggests? Are the ‘rich resources’ really those of the artist, or his/her patron?

And does a human sense of beauty really converge with animal mating displays? Sure, we admire the peacock’s tail, but some of these displays just strike us as bizarre. And many ‘beautiful’ animal traits, such as some butterfly markings, aren’t used for sexual display in any case. Humphrey argues that biological ‘good form’ is necessarily adaptive – among which characteristics he lists ‘rhyme’ (huh?), grace and symmetry. But symmetry is not necessarily adaptive in itself, and in any case, do we really look for the highest symmetry in art? (Answer: no. The highest symmetry is uniformity.)

But the weakest part of the argument surely comes when Humphrey tries to explain why we deceive ourselves in imagining that there is a creator in nature. He says that ‘at least in modern culture, many of our encounters with nature come first through art.’ One could question this statement even as it stands, but even if you accept it, it won’t wash. Why would we transform the ‘maker’ of a painting of a waterfall into a ‘maker’ of the waterfall itself? More to the point, if this is only the case in ‘modern culture’ (which it is), then it can play no evolutionary role.

Humphrey asks an important question: why do we possess a sense of beauty? It’s hard to answer, for sure. But inventing Just So stories, devoid of any means of empirical validation, won’t help. Nor are we likely to get very far by introversion: by assuming, as Hobbes and Descartes did, that we can so easily step outside our culture that it is meaningful to commence by asking ‘Well, how do I feel about it?’ We need at least to begin by asking not only what other cultures find beautiful, but what they mean by beauty.

Christmas is coming

I’m excited. Really. I have just discovered that my friend Mark Miodownik is going to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year. Mark is a materials scientist at King’s College (where, outrageously, the Materials Science Department is no more). He runs the wonderful Materials Library, where one can see and touch lots of very weird materials. I can think of no one better to fill Michael Faraday’s shoes for the Christmas Lectures, and I plan to be there.

More on the problem with economics

OK, my article on agent-based modelling of the economy is now out in the Economist – you might be able to get it here, but if firewalls prevent that then here, naturally, is the original thing. And I’m interested that the reader comments don’t seem by any means as adverse to this sort of thing as I’d imagined regular economists would be. Encouraging. Some feel that the economy, or people, are too complex to be captured by any kind of modelling. I don’t believe there is any reason to think that (and some good evidence to the contrary), although it is surely right that we must keep all models in perspective. And we have to remember that social science is the hardest science of all.

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For economists, the most serious deficit of the credit crunch may be in credibility. Vocal critics such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb are demanding to know why, when they failed utterly to foresee the crisis – indeed, apparently endorsed the conditions that created it – we should have the slightest faith in their capacity to mend it. And the diametrically opposed views of professional economists on what the remedy should be scarcely commands trust.

Yet there is little sign of discomfort or self-reflection in the citadel of orthodox economic theory. Much the same people, using much the same tools, are guiding economic policy after the crash as before it. Forecasting at the Federal Reserve, for example, is still being done using the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that led one of its governors, Frederic Mishkin, to deliver an assessment of the downturn in the US housing market in summer 2007 that now looks grotesquely optimistic. The message seems to be ‘if you don’t fix it, it ain’t broke.’

Mainstream economics has always had its dissidents. But the seeds of change have never before found such fertile soil. Heavyweights such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman are calling for radical rethinking. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in New York, which had its inaugural conference in April, boasts Stiglitz and Amartya Sen on its advisory board, and is bankrolled by George Soros. A hearing of the US House of Representatives Committee of Science and Technology in July called on distinguished witnesses such as Robert Solow to ‘build a science of economics for the real world’.

Critics tend to concur about what is wrong with the tools currently used for macroeconomic forecasting and policy – DSGE models were targeted in the House hearing, for example, while the INET has attacked many of the assumptions, including the efficient-market hypothesis and rational expectations, on which these models are predicated. But there is less agreement about what should replace the old techniques.

The hearing aimed to ‘question the wisdom of relying for national economic policy on a single, specific model when alternatives are available.’ One of the most promising and popular of these alternatives was on display at a workshop in Warrenton, Virginia at the end of June, funded by the US National Science Foundation and attended by a diverse bunch that included economists from the Fed and the Bank of England, social scientists, policy advisors and computer scientists. They explored the potential of so-called agent-based models (ABMs) of the economy to help us learn the lessons of the current financial crisis and perhaps to develop an early-warning system for anticipating the next one.  Better still, this non-traditional approach might offer prevention rather than cure: not the false promise of a crisis-free economy, but a way of identifying systemic vulnerabilities and mitigating their effects.

Agent-based modeling [1] does not assume that the economy can achieve a settled equilibrium. The modeler imposes no order or design on the economy from the top down, and unlike many traditional models, ABMs are not populated with ‘representative agents’: identical traders, firms or households whose individual behaviour mirrors the economy as a whole. Rather, an ABM uses a bottom-up approach which assigns particular behavioural rules to each agent. For example, some may believe that prices reflect fundamentals while others may rely on empirical observations of past price trends.

Crucially, agent behaviour may be determined (and altered) by direct interactions between them, whereas in conventional models interaction happens only indirectly through pricing. This provision of ABMs enables, for example, the copycat behaviour that leads to “herding” among investors. The agents may learn from experience or switch their strategies according to majority opinion. They can aggregate into institutional structures such as banks and firms. These things are very hard, sometimes impossible, to build into conventional models. But in an agent-based model one simply runs a computer simulation to see what emerges, free from any top-down assumptions. As economist Alan Kirman has put it, ABMs ‘provide an account of macro phenomena which are caused by interaction at the micro level but are no longer a blown-up version of that activity.’

Agent-based models are not exactly an alternative to conventional approaches, but a generalization of them: just about any economic theory could be expressed as an ABM, including the DSGE models now used for forecasting by most central banks. While those models are also based on microeconomic foundations, they accept the traditional view that there exists some ideal equilibrium towards which all prices are drawn. That this is often approximately true is why DSGE models perform well enough in a business-as-usual economy.

But DSGE models are useless in a crisis, as even advocates such as Robert Lucas admit. Last year, Lucas responded in this magazine to the criticism that these theories had failed to foresee the credit crunch by saying that such events are inherently unpredictable. All that can be reasonably expected of economic models, Lucas implied, is that they work well in ‘normal’ times. Crashes must forever be anomalies where theory breaks down.

That’s true of DSGE models because their ‘dynamic stochastic’ element amounts to minor fluctuations around an equilibrium state. Yet there is no equilibrium during big market fluctuations such as crashes – one can say that DSGE models thus insist that such events never occur.

ABMs, in contrast, make no assumptions about the existence of efficient markets or general equilibrium. The markets that they generate are generally not in equilibrium at all but are more like a turbulent river or the weather system, subject to constant storms and seizures of all sizes. Big fluctuations and even crashes are an inherent feature.

That’s because ABMs contain feedback mechanisms that can potentially amplify small effects, such as the herding and panic that generates bubbles and crashes. In mathematical terms the models are nonlinear, meaning that effects need not be proportional to their causes. These nonlinearities are absent from DSGE models, but they were evidently central to the credit crunch.

For example, in Virginia Andrew Lo of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering presented a model of the US housing market, inspired by ABM approaches, which showed how a fateful conjunction of rising house prices, falling interest rates and easy access to refinancing created high systemic risk, amplifying the housing downturn into an awesome burden of debt [2]. And John Geanakoplos of Yale University explained how the leverage cycle in remortgaging – high leverage during booms, low during recessions – can bloom into instability like an out-of-control pendulum, unless carefully managed [3]. The web of interdependencies forged from the buck-passing of risk using complex derivatives may create the potential for propagating nonlinear instabilities analogous to those that crashed the power grid of the North American eastern seaboard in 2003, and are precisely the kind of thing that ABMs are well suited to capturing. Sujit Kapadia of the Bank of England is attempting to uncover and model these network-based vulnerabilities in financial systems [4],

While all of these culprits have been fingered in the voluminous post-mortems of the current crisis, there has been barely any discussion of the way nonlinear feedbacks gave them such impact. As a result, the understanding on which any preventative regulation and ‘macroprudential’ strategies might be based is still thin.

Another of the key lessons of the crisis is the role of interactions between different sectors – housing and finance, say. While concentional macroeconomic models can incorporate these, ABMs might be better tailored to each specific sector – for example, including banks in financial markets, which DSGE models do not. In principle, ABMs can include as much of the economy as you like, with all the sector-specific structures and quirks. Indeed, the organizers of the Virginia workshop – physicist-turned-economist Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and social scientist Robert Axtell of George Mason University in Virginia – wanted to explore the feasibility and utility of constructing an immense ABM of the entire global economy by ‘wiring’ many such modules together.

What might be required for such an enterprise in resources and expertise, and what might it hope to achieve? One vision is a real-time simulation, fed by masses of input data, that would operate rather like the traffic models now used for forecasting on the roads of Dallas and the Rhine-Westphalia region. But it might be more realistic and useful to employ a suite of such models, in the manner of global climate simulations, which project various possible futures and thus give an aggregated forecast – and show how our actions, laws and institutions might influence it.

In either case, the models would need much more data on the activities of individuals, banks and companies than is currently available. Gathering such information will be one of the key tasks of the US Office of Financial Research instituted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to reform Wall Street. While this plan has raised privacy fears, such data-gathering is no less essential for understanding the economy than are meteorological observations for understanding climate, or geological monitoring to anticipate earthquakes.

And although seismologists may never be able to make precise forecasts, it would be deplorable if they were to shrug and resign themselves to modelling just the regular, gradual movements of tectonic plates and faults. Instead they have developed methods for mapping the evolution of stress patterns, identifying areas at risk, and refining rough heuristics for hazard assessment. Why should the same not be done for the financial system? It won’t be cheap or easy. But to deny the very possibility merely to absolve the conventional models of their severe limitations is starting to look unforgivable.

References

1. B. LeBaron & L. Tesfatasion, Am. Econ. Rev. 98(2), 246-250 (2008).

2. A. E. Khandani, A. W. Lo & R. C. Merton, Working Paper, September 2009.

3. A. Fostel & J. Geanakoplos, Am. Econ. Rev. 98(4), 1211-1244 (2008).

4. P. Gai & S. Kapadia, Bank of England Working Paper 383 (2010).

A new kind of economics

This is the first of the pieces I've written on the back of a workshop that I attended at the end of June on agent-based modelling of the economy. It appears (in edited form) in the August issue of Prospect. I have also written on this for the Economist - will post that shortly. And I am writing on the more general issue of large-scale simulation of the economy and other social systems for New Scientist.

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Critics of conventional economic theory have never had it so good. The credit crunch has left the theory embraced by most of the economic community a sitting duck. Using the equations of the most orthodox theoretical framework – so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models – the governor of the Federal Reserve Frederic Mishkin forecast in the summer of 2007 that the banking problems triggered by stagnation of the US housing market would be a minor blip. The story that unfolded subsequently, culminating in September 2008 in the near-collapse of the global financial market, seemed to represent the kind of falsification that would bury any theory in the natural sciences.

But it has not done so here, and probably will not. How come? The Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, who advocated the replacement of Keynesian economic models with DSGE models in the 1970s, has explained why: this theory is explicitly not designed to handle crashes, so of course it will not predict them. That’s not a shortcoming of the models, Lucas says, but a reflection of the stark reality that crashes are inherently unpredictable by this or any other theory. They are aberrations, lacunae in the laws of economics.

You can see his point. Retrospective claims to have foreseen the crisis amount to little more than valid but generalized concerns about the perils of prosperity propped up by easy credit, or of complex financial instruments whose risks are opaque even to those using them. No one forecast the timing, direction or severity of the crash – and how could they, given that the debts directly tied up in ‘toxic’ sub-prime mortgage defaults were relatively minor?

But this pessimistic position is under challenge. For Lucas is wrong; there are models of financial markets that do generate crashes. Fluctuations ranging from the quotidian to the catastrophic are an intrinsic feature of some models that dispense with the simplifying premises of DSGE and instead try to construct market behaviour from the bottom up. They create computer simulations of large numbers of ‘agents’ – individuals who trade with one another according to specified decision-making rules, while responding to each others’ decisions. These so-called agent-based models take advantage of the capacity of modern computers to simulate complex interactions between vast numbers of agents. The approach has already been used successfully to understand and predict traffic flow and pedestrian movements – here the agents (vehicles or people) are programmed to move to their destination at a preferred speed unless they must slow down or veer to avoid a collision – as well as to improve models of contagion in disease epidemics.

A handful of economists, along with interlopers from the natural sciences, believe that agent-based models offer the best hope of understanding the economy in all its messy glory, rather than just the decorous aspects addressed by conventional theories. At a workshop in Virginia in June, I heard how ABMs might help us learn the lessons of the credit crunch, anticipate and guard against the next one, and perhaps even offer a working model of the entire economic system.

Some aspects of ABMs are so obviously an improvement on conventional economic theories that it seems bizarre to outsiders why they are still marginalized. Agents, like real traders, can behave in diverse ways. They can learn from experience. They are affected by each other’s actions, potentially leading to the herd behaviour that undoubtedly afflicts markets. ABMs, unlike DSGE models, can include institutions such as banks (a worrying omission, you might imagine, in models of financial markets). Some of these factors can be incorporated into orthodox theories, but not easily or transparently, and often they are not.

What upsets traditional economists most, however, is that ABMs are ‘non-equilibrium’ models, which means that they generally never settle into a steady state in which prices adjust to meet demand and markets ‘clear’, meaning that supply is perfectly matched to demand. Conventional economic thinking has, more or less since Adam Smith, assumed the reality of this platonic ideal, which is ruffled by external ‘shocks’ such as political events and policies. In its most simplistic form, this perfect market demands laissez-faire free trade, and is only hindered by regulation and intervention.

Even though orthodox theorists acknowledge that ‘market imperfections’ cause deviations from this ideal (market failures), that very terminology gives the game away. In ABMs, ‘imperfections’ and ‘failures’ are generally a natural, emergent feature of the more realistic ingredients of the models. This posits a totally different view of how the economy operates. For example, feedbacks such as herd-like trading behaviour can create bubbles in which commodity prices soar on a wave of optimism, and crashes when panic sweeps across the trading floor. It seems clear that such amplifying processes turned a downturn of the US housing market into a freezing of credit throughout the entire banking system.

What made the Virginia meeting, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, unusual is that it was relatively heedless of these battle lines between conventional and alternative thinkers. Committed agent-based modellers mixed with researchers from the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Rand Corporation, specialists in housing markets and policy advisers. The goal was both to unravel the lessons of the credit crunch and to discuss the feasibility of making immense ABMs with genuine predictive capability. That would be a formidable enterprise, requiring the collaboration of many different experts and probably costing tens of millions of dollars. Even with the resources, it would probably take at least five years to have a model up and running.

Once that would have seemed a lot to gamble. Now, with a bill from the crisis running to trillions (and the threat of more to come), to refuse this investment would border on the irresponsible. Could such a model predict the next crisis, though? That’s the wrong question. The aim – and there is surely no president, chancellor, or lending or investment bank CEO who does not now crave this – would be to identify where the systemic vulnerabilities lie, what regulations might mitigate them (and which would do the opposite), and whether early-warning systems could spot danger signs. We’ve done it for climate change. Does anyone now doubt that economic meltdown poses comparable risks and costs?

Darwin vs D'Arcy: a false dichotomy?

I’ve just been directed towards P. Z. Myer’s Pharyngula blog in which, during the course of a dissection of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book What Darwin Got Wrong, Myers has the following to say about D’Arcy Thompson and On Growth and Form:

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was wrong.

Elegantly wrong, but still wrong. He just never grasped how much of genetics explained the mathematical beauty of biology, and it's a real shame — if he were alive today, I'm sure he'd be busily applying network theory to genetic interactions.

[Sorry, must stop you there. Not even Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini called their book Darwin Was Wrong. I suspect they wanted to, but could not justify it even to themselves. D’Arcy Thompson’s book is over 1000 pages long. Is it all wrong? Simple answer: of course it is not. Take a look at this, for example. I know; this is simply rhetoric. It’s just that I still believe it matters to find the right words, rather than sound bites.]

Let's consider that Fibonacci sequence much beloved by poseurs. It's beautiful, it is so simple, it appears over and over again in nature, surely it must reflect some intrinsic, fundamentally mathematical ideal inherent in the universe, some wonderful cosmic law — it appears in the spiral of a nautilus shell as well as the distribution of seeds in the head of a sunflower, so it must be magic. Nope. In biology, it’s all genes and cellular interactions, explained perfectly well by the reductionism [Mary] Midgley deplores [in her review of F&P-P].

The Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…each term generated by summing the previous two terms) has long had this kind of semi-mystical aura about it. It's related to the Golden Ratio, phi, of 1.6180339887… because, as you divide each term by the previous term, the ratio tends towards the Golden Ratio as you carry the sequence out farther and farther. It also provides a neat way to generate logarithmic spirals, as we seen in sunflowers and nautiluses. And that's where the genes sneak in.

Start with a single square on a piece of graph paper. Working counterclockwise in this example, draw a second square with sides of the same length next to it. Then a third square with the same dimensions on one side as the previous two squares. Then a fourth next to the previous squares…you get the idea. You can do this until you fill up the whole sheet of paper. Now look at the lengths of each side of the squares in the series — it's the Fibonacci sequence, no surprise at all there.

You can also connect the corners with a smooth curve, and what emerges is a very pretty spiral — like a nautilus shell.

It's magic! Or, it's mathematics, which sometimes seems like magic! But it's also simple biology. I look at the whirling squares with the eyes of a developmental biologist, and what do I see? A simple sequential pattern of induction. A patch of cells uses molecules to signal an adjacent patch of cells to differentiate into a structure, and then together they induce a larger adjacent patch, and together they induce an even larger patch…the pattern is a consequence of a mathematical property of a series expressed on a 2-dimensional sheet, but the actual explanation for why it recurs in nature is because it's what happens when patches of cells recruit adjacent cells in a temporal sequence. Abstract math won't tell you the details of how it happens; for that, you need to ask what are the signaling molecules and what are the responding genes in the sunflower or the mollusc. That's where Thompson and these new wankers of the pluralist wedge fail — they stop at the cool pictures and the mathematical formulae and regard the mechanics of implementation as non-essential details, when it's precisely those molecular details that generate the emergent property that dazzles them…

There is nothing in this concept that vitiates our modern understanding of evolutionary theory, the whole program of studying changes in genes and their propagation through populations. That's the mechanism of evolutionary change. What evo-devo does is add another dimension to the issue: how does a mutation in one gene generate a ripple of alterations in the pattern of expression of other genes? How does a change in a sequence of DNA get translated into a change in form and physiology?

Those are interesting and important questions, and of course they have consequences on evolutionary outcomes…but they don't argue against genetics, population genetics, speciation theory, mutation, selection, drift, or the whole danged edifice of modern evolutionary biology. To argue otherwise is like claiming the prettiness of a flower is evidence against the existence of a root.

OK (hello, me again), I think I’d go along with just about all of this, apart from a suspicion that there is probably a better term for ‘wankers of the pluralist wedge’. Indeed, it is precisely how this self-organization is initiated at the biomolecular/cellular level that I have explored, both in phyllotaxis and in developmental biology generally, in my book Shapes (OUP, 2009) (alright, but I’m just saying). Yet there seems to be a big oversight here. Myers seems to be implying that, because genetic signals are involved, phyllotactic patterns are adaptive. I’m not aware that there is any evidence for that. In fact, quite the contrary: it seems that spiral Fibonacci phyllotaxis is the generic pattern for any meristem budding process that operates by some reaction-diffusion scheme, or indeed by any more general process in which the pattern elements experience an effective mutual repulsion in this cylindrical geometry (see here). So apparently, in phyllotaxis at least, the patterns and shapes are not a product of natural selection. Possessing leaves is surely adaptive, but there seems to be little choice in where they go if they are to be initiated by diffusing hormones. In his review of F&P-P, Michael Ruse puts it this way: ‘The order of a plant’s leaves may be fixed, but how those leaves stand up or lie down is selection-driven all of the way.’

So sure, there is absolutely nothing in this picture that challenges Neodarwinism. And sure, we should say so. But it does imply that, in the case of plants, an important aspect of shape determination may lie beyond the reach of natural selection to do much about. And this surely suggests that, since the same processes of morphogen diffusion operate in animal development, there might equally be aspects of that process too that have little to do with natural selection. Myers alludes to the case of spiralling mollusc shells: well yes, here too it appears that the basic logarithmic-spiral shape is going to be enforced by the simple maths of self-similar growth, and all evolution can do is fine-tune the contours of that spiral. That, indeed, is what Myers has said, though appearing to think he has not: the pattern is an inevitable consequence of the maths of the growth process. So no, it’s not magic. But it’s not in itself adaptive either. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that was basically D’Arcy Thompson’s point (which is not to deny that he was unreasonably suspicious of adaptive explanations).

One of the points that F&P-P make is that insufficient effort has been devoted to asking how far these constraints operate. I agree with that much, and the blasé way in which Myers implies self-organization is just enslaved by natural selection perhaps explains why this is so. Let me say this clearly (because, my God, you have to do that with all these fellows): of course canny Neodarwinists accept that not every aspect of growth and form is adaptive (and by the way, I’m this kind of Neodarwinist too). But it seems quite possible that even rather significant morphological features such as phyllotactic patterns may be included in these non-adaptive traits – and that is less commonly recognized. Ian Stewart argued the same point in Life’s Other Secret. Anyone wishing to argue that such constraints undermine the case for natural selection happening at all is of course talking utter nonsense (and not even Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini go that far). But it’s an interesting issue, and I’m made uncomfortable when people, through understandable fear of creationism’s malign distortions, want to insist that it’s not.

The Disappearing Spoon

I have a review of Sam Kean’s book The Disappearing Spoon in the latest issue of Nature. I am posting the pre-edited version here mostly because a change made to the text after I’d seen the proofs has inverted my meaning in the published version in an important way, rendering it most confusing. Such things happen. But this is what it was meant to say.

I really didn’t want to be too hard on this book, and I hope I wasn’t – it does have genuine merits, and I feel sure Kean will write some more good stuff. But it did sometimes make me grind my teeth.

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The Disappearing Spoon

Sam Kean

Little, Brown & Co, New York.

400 pages

$24.99

Can there be a more pointless enterprise in scientific taxonomy than redesigning the Periodic Table? What is it that inspires these spirals, pretzels, pyramids and hyper-cubes? They hint at a suspicion that we have not yet fully cracked the geometry of the elements, that there is some hidden understanding to be teased out from these baroque juxtapositions of nature’s ‘building blocks’. It is probably the same impulse that motivated grand unified theories and supersymmetry – a determination to find cryptic order and simplicity, albeit here inappropriately directed towards contingency.

To call the Periodic Table contingent might elicit howls of protest, for the allowed configurations of electrons around nuclei are surely a deterministic consequence of quantum mechanics. But the logic of these arrangements is in the end tortuous, with the electron-shell occupancy (2, 8, 18…) subdivided and interleaved. The delicate balance of electron-electron interactions creates untidy anomalies such as non-sequential sub-shell filling and the postponed incursions of the d and f subshells, making the Periodic Table especially unwieldy in two dimensions. And relativistic effects – the distortion of electron energies by their tremendous speeds in heavy atoms – create oddities such as mercury’s low melting point and gold’s yellow lustre. All can be explained, but not elegantly.

There is thus little to venerate aesthetically in the Periodic Table, a messy family tree whose charm stems more from its quirks than its orderliness. No one doubts its mnemonic utility, but new-fangled configurations of the elements will not improve that function more than infinitesimally. It seems perverse that we continue to regard the Table as an object of beauty, rather than as just the piecemeal way things turned out at this level in the hierarchy of matter.

More pertinently, it seems odd still to regard it as the intellectual framework of chemistry. Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon implicitly accepts that notion, although he is more interested in presenting it as a cast of characters, a way of telling stories about ‘all of the wonderful and artful and ugly aspects of human beings and how we interact with the physical world.’ Those stories are here unashamedly as much about physics as chemistry, for exploring the nether reaches of the Periodic Table has depended on nuclear physics and particle accelerators. With molecules featuring only occasionally as receptacles into which atoms of specific elements are fitted like stones in jewellery, The Disappearing Spoon is not the survey of chemistry it might at first seem.

So what, you might say – except that by making the Periodic Table the organizational emblem of his book, Kean ends up with a similarly piecemeal construction, an arrangement of facts about the behaviours and histories of the elements rather than a thesis about our conception of the material world. It is an attractive collection of tales, but lacks a moral: resolutely from the ‘there’s a thing’ school of science writing, it is best taken in small, energizing bites than digested in one sitting. This makes for enjoyable snacking, and I defy anyone not to learn something – in my case, for example, the story (treated with appropriate caution) of Scott of the Antarctic’s misadventure with tin solder, allegedly converted by the extreme cold into a brittle allotrope. The more familiar tale of the disintegrating buttons of Napoleon’s troops in the fateful Russian campaign, alluded to here, furnished the title of Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s portmanteau of ‘molecules that changed history’, Napoleon’s Buttons (Tarcher/Puttnam, 2003), another example of this genre – and indeed most of Kean’s stories have been told before.

It should be said, moreover, that when the reader learns something, it is at what we might call a particular cognitive level – namely, that which Kelvin considers Rutherford to be ‘full of crap’ and William Crookes’ dalliance with spiritualism enabled ‘135 years of New Age-y BS’. There’s a fine line between accessible informality and ahistorical sloppiness, between the wryness of hindsight and smirks at the conventions (and sartorial norms) of the past. And although Kean’s writing has the virtues of energy and pace, one hopes that his cultural horizons might come to extend beyond the United States: rarely have I felt so constantly reminded of an author’s nationality, whether by Cold War partisanship or references to Mentos and Life Savers.

More serious is the Whiggish strain that turns retrospective errors into irredeemable gaffes rather than the normal business of science. Emilio Segrè certainly slipped up when he failed to spot the first transuranic element, neptunium, and Linus Pauling’s inside-out model of DNA was worse than a poor guess, ignoring the implausibility of the closely packed anionic phosphate groups. But scientists routinely perpetrate such mistakes, and it is more illuminating to put them in context than to present them as pratfalls.

The Disappearing Spoon is a first book, and its flaws detract only slightly from the promise its author exhibits. His next will doubtless give a more telling indication of what he can do.

Why music is good for you

Here’s my latest Muse article for Nature News. I hope it does not sound in any way critical of the peg paper (reference 3), which is a very nice read.

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A survey of the cognitive benefits of music makes a valid case for its educational importance. But that's not the best reason to teach all children music.

Remember the Mozart effect? Thanks to a suggestion in 1993 that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, there has been a flood of compilation CDs filled with classical tunes that will allegedly boost your baby’s brain power.

Yet there’s no evidence for this claim, and indeed the original ‘Mozart effect’ paper [1] did not make it. It reported a slight, short-term performance enhancement in some spatial tasks when preceded by listening to Mozart as opposed to sitting in silence. Some follow-up studies replicated the effect, others did not. None found it specific to Mozart; one study showed that pop music could have the same effect on schoolchildren [2]. It seems this curious but marginal effect stems from the cognitive benefits of any enjoyable auditory stimulus, which need not even be musical.

The original claim doubtless had such inordinate impact because it plays to a long-standing suspicion that music makes you smarter. And as neuroscientists Nina Kraus and Bharath Chandrasekaran of Northwestern University in Illinois point out in a review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience [3], there is good evidence that music training reshapes the brain in ways that convey broader cognitive benefits. It can, they say, lead to ‘changes throughout the auditory system that prime musicians for listening challenges beyond music processing’ – such as interpreting language.

This is no surprise. Many sorts of mental training and learning alter the brain, just as physical training alters the body, and learning-related structural differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians are well established [4]. Moreover, both neurological and psychological tests show that music processing draws on cognitive resources that are not music-specific, such as pitch processing, memory and pattern recognition [5] – so cultivating these mental functions through music would naturally be expected to have a wider payoff. The interactions are two-way: the pitch sensitivity imbued by tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, for example, enhances the ability to name a musical note just from hearing it (called absolute pitch) [6].

We can hardly be surprised, meanwhile, that music lessons improve childrens’ IQ [7], given that these will nourish general faculties such as memory, coordination and attentiveness. Kraus and Chandrasekaran now point out that, thanks to the brain’s plasticity (ability to ‘rewire’ itself), musical training sharpens our sensitivity to pitch, timing and timbre, and as a result our capacity to discern emotional intonation in speech, to learn our native and foreign languages, and to identify statistical regularities in abstract sound stimuli.

Yet all these benefits of music education have done rather little to alter a common perception that music is an optional extra to be offered (beyond tokenistic exposure) only if children have the time and inclination. Ethnomusicologist John Blacking put it more damningly: we insist that musicality is a rare gift, so that music is to be created by a tiny minority for the passive consumption of the majority [8]. Having spent years among African cultures that recognized no such distinctions, Blacking was appalled at the way this elitism labelled most people ‘unmusical’.

Kraus and Chandrasekaran rightly argue that the marginalization of music training in schools ‘should be reassessed’ in light of the benefits it may offer by ‘improving learning skills and listening ability’. But it will be a sad day when the only way to persuade educationalists to embrace music is via its side-effects on cognition and intelligence. We should be especially wary of that argument in this age of cost-benefit analyses, targets and utilitarian impact assessments. Music should indeed be celebrated (and studied) as a gymnasium for the mind; but ultimately its value lies with the way it enriches, socializes and humanizes us qua music.

And while in no way detracting from the validity of calling for music to be essential in education, it’s significant that musical training, like any other pleasure, has its hazards when taken to excess. I was recently privileged to discuss with the pianist Leon Fleisher his traumatic but fascinating struggle with focal dystonia, a condition that results in localized loss of muscle control. Fleisher’s dazzling career as a concert pianist was almost ended in the early 1960s when he found that two fingers of his right hand insisted on curling up. After several decades of teaching and one-handed playing, Fleisher regained the use of both hands through a regime of deep massage and injections of botox to relax the muscles. But he says his condition is still present, and he must constantly battle against it.

Focal dystonia is not a muscular problem (like cramp) but a neural one: over-training disrupts the feedback between muscles and brain, expanding the representation of the hand in the sensory cortex until the neural correlates of the fingers blur. It is the dark side of neural plasticity, and not so uncommon – an estimated one in a hundred professional musicians suffer from it, though some do so in secrecy, fearful of admitting to the debilitating problem.

We would be hugely impoverished without virtuosi such as Fleisher. But his plight serves as a reminder that hot-housing has its dangers, not only for the performers but (as Blacking) suggests for the rest of us. Give us fine music, but rough music too.

References

1. Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L. & Ky, K. N. Nature 365, 611 (1993).

2. Schellenberg, E. G. & Hallam, S. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1060, 202-209 (2005).

3. Kraus, N. & Chandrasekaran, B. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 11, 599-605 (2010).

4. Gaser, C. & Schlaug, G. J. Neurosci. 23, 9240-9245 (2003).

5. Patel, A. D. Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008).

6. Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., Marvin, E. & Xu, H.-S. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 719-722 (2006).

7. Schellenberg, E. G. J. Educ. Psychol. 98, 457-468 (2006).

8. Blacking, J. How Musical Is Man? (Faber & Faber, London, 1976).

Organic nightmares

How do you make and use a Grignard reagent? This isn’t a question that has generally kept me awake at night. But last night it gave me nightmares. As a rule my ‘exam anxiety’ dreams, three decades after the event, feature maths: I find, days before the exam, that I have done none of the coursework or required reading, and am clueless about all of the mathematical methods on which I’m about to be grilled. Now it seems I may be about to transfer my disturbance to organic synthesis. Last night I was even at the stage of sitting in the exam hall waiting to be told to open the test paper, when I realised that I could recall not one of the countless details of reagents, methods and strategies involved in the Grignard reaction in particular (yes, alkylmagnesium, I know that much) or the aldol reaction, Claesen rerrangement, Friedel-Crafts acylation and all the rest. Now, I know this is nothing shameful even for someone who writes about chemistry for a living – as I say, it was three decades ago that I learnt this stuff, and if I want to know the details now then I can look them up, right? And my memory of the Diels-Alder reaction, about which I’ve written relatively recently, remains sufficiently fleshed-out to reassure me that the decay constant of my mind is at least still measured in years rather than days. All the same, it is sobering bordering on scary to realise that (i) I did once have to memorize all this stuff, and (ii) I did so. Organic synthesis can achieve tremendous elegance, and is not devoid of general principles; but this dream reminds me that it is nonetheless perhaps the closest chemistry comes to becoming a list of bald, unforgiving facts.

Oh God, and the truly scary thing is that I just looked up Grignard reagents on Wikipedia, and… and there was a carbonyl group lurking in my dream too. I think I’d have been more reassured to know that I was just improvising than that a fragment of that grim scheme has stayed lodged in my cortex.