Dark Genes

evil genes

The Genetics of Evil

A compilation of the 50 most evil villains in literature by the UK’s newspaper, The Telegraph, listed the devil at the number one position on its list. The number two position was given to a fictional rat. Samuel Whiskers, from Beatrix Potter’s story, The Tale Of Samuel Whiskers, is certainly a bad fellow. He steals from the house in which he lives, and tries to make Tom Kitten into a dumpling:

tom kitten

But determining whether Samuel Whiskers is truly evil is difficult. According to most Western traditions, evil is the absence of good, and doesn’t have an independent identity. Other traditions, such as Buddhism, in which evil is an intrinsic element of existence, or Zoroastrianism and Star Wars, in which good and evil are opposing forces, have different definitions. Even if we stick with Western definitions, the question of Samuel Whiskers still is not clear. According to Thomas Aquinas, evil is the absence of goodness which should be found in our nature. A rat, which is an omnivore, may be acting in accord with its nature when it tries to eat a kitten (Tom Kitten survives, by the way, and learns to avoid rats in the future), and thus is not really evil. At best we could say that he seems to be participating in a metaphysical evil, in that nature can seem cruel and evil. As Woody Allen said, “To me, nature is… I dunno, spiders and bugs and big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating…It’s like an enormous restaurant.”

A well fed rat may not be evil per se, but cooking a live kitten in a dumpling probably is.

So let’s suppose that Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers are both people, or at least, sentient beings, and judging by their clothing (Tom Kitten had a nice blue jacket before being covered in dough), that is a reasonable assumption. In this case, most would agree that Samuel Whiskers was performing a moral evil by going against our accepted moral order. Sentient beings don’t cook each other for their puddings. Furthermore, Aquinas also suggests that as our world is not in itself bad, evil must exist within our actions, not in the effect. In this case, a well fed rat (the result of eating Tom Kitten) is not an evil thing, per se. Rats deserve to be fed. However, rolling a live kitten into a dumpling is evil.

Why Samuel Whiskers is evil is an even more difficult question than determining if he is evil. All rodents are not bad to Beatrix Potter, as her Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse clearly attests. Therefore the problem must be something specific to Samuel. Still following Aquinas, the root cause of evil is our free will, we have been given the freedom to make bad choices, and we frequently do so. Aquinas states that maybe sometimes the temptation to transgress can come from that villain at the number one slot on The Telegraph’s list (Satan), but often not, it’s just our choice. Current thinking, which largely discounts a role of Satan in clinical psychology, specifically posits social and economic factors as main factors in prompting our transgressions. Additionally, since the 1960’s a genetic cause for moral evilness has also been a contested but active area of research.

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The Intersect of Harry Potter and Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin resting against pillar covered with vines.

Genetics, fan fiction, and the meaning of life

An excellent rule for avoiding conflict in social situations is to avoid any discussion of religion and politics. A recent addendum to this advice would be to also shun discussing the potential love interest of fictional characters, or in the lingo of fan-fiction, “’ships”. An example: in the world of Harry Potter, for many, Harry and Ginny Weasley never marry, though this was established in the final book’s epilogue. For these fans, whose mantra is “Epilogue? What epilogue?” the correct pairings are Harry and Hermione, Harry and Draco Malfoy, or Hermione and Snape (incidentally, I will contend that last one is wrong on multiple levels).  Online discussions of the obviousness or absurdity, propriety or unseemliness of these relationships can assume levels of violent self-righteousness that makes one very grateful that these arguments are conducted largely within a demographic with low gun ownership.

Fictional characters engender so much emotion in us because they are incomplete, no matter how good the author is. In fact, good writing is as much as what should be left unsaid as what needs to be written down. The book (or the movie) can only give us a limited set of facts or images. The full character of a character is left unwritten, and it’s our job as readers to fill this in. Therefore it is the act of reading, when we fill in the blanks with our own visions, that gives the characters real meaning. And when our visions of a character’s personality are denied in book five, or in episode four of the second season, or the epilogue, or even in someone else’s fan fiction, it’s a personal attack. We’ve created the characters in our image, and vested them with our own visions of what they mean to their fictional world, and now that is being annulled. And in the cases of those writing any romances which involve Dumbledore, those fan fiction versions of the character are also just plain wrong.

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In Defense Of Irreproducible Results

Kirk-Tribbles-3

The dangers of p-values and Klingons

Science is hard. Well, lots of things are hard. Baking a good baguette is hard. Remembering everyone’s birthday (before their birthday) is hard too, as are granite boulders. But science has a special trick up its sleeve that makes it quantifiably hard: the p-value. P-values are supposed to help us identify results that are statistically significant, but getting a low p-value is difficult. In the medical sciences, achieving statistical significance usually means having a good question, a lot of patient samples, and doing your assays and calculations well. The former requires cleverness, the middle requires resources, and the final entails diligence. Combining all these traits in one researcher, or even one research team, is hard. I, for one, still haven’t figured out what all the bins in my refrigerator are for, let alone be able to manage an entire clinical study workflow.

And to make it worse, the scientific community is now taking very close looks at everyone’s p-values to make sure that these low p-values mean what they’re supposed to mean. Not only should data be significant, but it should be reproducible. Unfortunately it seems that research results frequently are not reproducible. In fact, we are in the midst of a “reproducibility crisis”, according to some. Various studies have suggested that most published results, in medicine and the social sciences, are not repeatable, despite having nice p-values in the original study.

Does this reproducibility crisis merit pitchforks and torches, or better study design and a philosophical debate? Why not both?!

Why is this? Is the reproducibility crisis due to a mixture of fraud and lazy science, for which pitchforks, lighted torches, and storming the gates are the best response? Or is it more complicated, requiring more agreement on good study design and an understanding of just how reproducible scientific results really should be? Probably mostly the latter, but we can add in a little of the former too, just to keep in interesting.

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