EPOXI is already in orbit (not shown) around the Sun. This graphic shows its trajectory starting from the 2009 Earth Flyby. The spacecraft will make its last Earth Flyby on 27 June 2010 before heading to its rendezvous with comet Hartley

Remember the Deep Impact spacecraft that released a probe that smashed into Comet Temple I back on July 4, 2005?  I sure do, I attended a Moody Blues concert and got home in time to watch it.  It was an amazing end to a fine day.

The part of the spacecraft that didn’t hit the comet, the part that contains two cameras, two telescopes and an infrared spectrometer, was recycled thanks in large part to Michael A’Hearn (University of Maryland, Deep Impact team leader and all around good guy).  What is recycled you ask?  Well through careful planning, it means another comet encounter and guess what else?  They set the spacecraft on an altered course with one last flyby of Earth this past Sunday.

The spacecraft came as close as 18,900 miles above the South Atlantic and from that got a gravity assist to increase its speed by a whooping 1.5-Km/sec – that’s 3,470 mph.  The result will be to reshape the spacecrafts orbit just the right amount to have a close encounter with Comet Hartley 2.  We won’t be waiting long either, science data will start to be received this September and the close encounter will occur on November 4, 2010.  Don’t expect an impact this time around though.

What’s in a name?  EPOXI is an extended mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft. Its name is derived from its two tasked science investigations — the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh) and the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI).

[I was originally going to avoid this, but decided to do it for the critical analysis, because I suspect it will be widely but badly covered, and because I also suspect that very little of this coverage will point out the publication record of these authors. Which is worth pointing out. Have fun in the comments!]

Why do different countries have different IQs? You’d first answer probably has something to do with education, but a trio of US scientists have put forward a radically different hypothesis – international variation in intelligence is related to the prevalence of parasites in a country. As is, according to them, pretty much ever y major aspect of human culture (but more on this later)…

Christopher Eppig, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill (yes, that one) from the University of New Mexico have suggested that fighting off parasitic infections during childhood takes up valuable energy that might otherwise go towards the development of the brain. More parasites mean less well developed brains and weaker mental abilities.

To test their controversial idea, the trio collected average IQ values for countries all over the world using three separate sets of data. They also used the World Health Organisation’s data on global “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs), a measure of a country’s disease burden that looks at the number of years of ‘healthy’ life lost by an average citizen because of poor health. They found a strong correlation between these two figures, both across all nations and within each continent (except South America).

They claimed that the prevalence of infectious diseases is the “most powerful predictor of average national IQ”, even after they adjusted the results for other factors, like each country’s temperature, GDP, literacy rate, enrolment in secondary school and more. They also suggest that this could help to explain the mysterious Flynn effect, where IQ increases sharply as a nation develops.

The very obvious caveat to all of this is that old adage that correlation is not causation. In this case, a link between infections and IQ tells us nothing about whether infected people grow up to be less intelligent, or whether intelligent people are less likely to become infected. Intelligence, after all, could affect one’s understanding of what a disease is, how to avoid it, and how to seek help for an infection. And perhaps a third factor is at work here – higher education could lead to both greater intelligence and the knowledge to avoid common infections. Readers may enjoy trying to come up with alternative explanations of their own.

These problems become particularly astute when you’re looking for correlations between statistics that represent entire nations. This broad-brush ‘ecological’ approach tells us nothing at the individual level. In a given country, do children who acquire early infections grow up to have lower IQs? We simply don’t know.

In fairness to Eppig, Fincher and Thornhill, they say, “We are not arguing that global variation in intelligence is only caused by parasite stress.” They also frame their paper as a way of introducing a hypothesis and suggest ways of testing it. Fair enough, but they have supported their hypothesis with data that are, at best, inconclusive. As such, I wonder what this study is doing in a Royal Society journal rather than, say, Medical Hypotheses.

Indeed, as I alluded to earlier, this new paper is the latest in a long line of hypothesis-generating publications from Fincher and Thornhill linking parasites and infections to pretty much any sweeping aspect of human life you can think of. Through similar studies based on correlations at the national level, Thornhill and Fincher have suggested that infections are linked to individualism and collectivism, religious diversity, linguistic diversity, armed conflicts and civil war, and democracy and liberal values. Like any attempt to explain very complex patterns of human behaviour through a single cause, this ought to raise an eyebrow. I’m raising two.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0973

Social conservative blogger Rod Dreher points me to this interview of a Left-wing sociologist on the malevolent influence of pornography on modern relationships. She has a book out, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Her conclusion:

To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to understand the role pornography is playing in our culture, I can’t see any reason that this won’t get worse, because all of these men who started watching pornography young are going to want more and more. Pornographers themselves say they’re having trouble keeping up with what fans want because they want it so hardcore.

Where is this going to end? I don’t know. What will an 11-year-old boy want 10, 20, or 30 years from now? Nobody knows. The truth is we’ve never brought up a generation of males with hardcore pornography. No one can really say what’s going to happen. What we do know, from how images and media affect people, is that it’s going to increasingly shape the way men think about sex, sexuality, and relationships.

A lot of the rest of the interview is going to, or not going to, make sense depending on your priors. Just as Christian evangelical psychotherapy, or a rabbi making a ruling based on the halakhah, uses terms and logics which may seem totally meaningless to outsiders, so people trained in sociology operate in their own lexical universe which operates in a parallel empirical world (when I actually spent some time around young evangelical Christians I recalled that they often interspersed their banal conversations with phrases such as “glorifying God,” or “glorifying my Lord and Savior,” which seemed to have a lot of meaning for them, even if it was about their workout regime*). As an intellectual exercise I often take an interest in what sociologists say, but it’s equivalent to theology as far as I’m concerned insofar as it makes any pretense to mapping onto reality. In contrast, I think economists are guilty of hubris and error, but they at least aim for some clarity so you know when they’re wrong. I am here thinking of Noam Chomsky’s attitude toward Post Modernism.

On a personal note I come from a generation which spanned the period when pornography was scarce, and when it was ubiquitous. It’s an empirically correct observation that it takes two seconds to find extremely disgusting fetish material, whereas before the internet you may not even have been aware of the existence of whole genres of pornography! A case in point, I did not know of the existence of bestiality until I was sixteen years old (a friend took me to a Christian youth group meeting, and the pastor started talking about all the disgusting perverted things you weren’t supposed to do, but he had to define a lot of it in the process). A few years after I happened to walk by a computer in a family room, and I saw that an eight year old boy was deleting disgusting fetish porn spam from his Hotmail account! What had been beyond the ken of my comprehension even into adolescence was a nuisance for this individual in their elementary school years.

Over the past 15 years we’ve run a massive sociological experiment in the United States of America. A whole generation has grown up with easy access to hardcore pornography. Many of the boys exposed in the 1990s are now 30 and older, and starting families. And yet violent crime is still declining in the United States, including rape. There is also no robust evidence that the youth of today are more sexual than those of the past.

That’s why I say that the sorts of sociologists profiled above live in a parallel world, where porn is a primary determinant of the decline in morals in manners. They wouldn’t say morals and manners, but I think that’s what really going on, and explains the attraction of social conservatives like Rod Dreher to the Left-wing critiques. The terminology may differ, but it isn’t too hard to do a search & replace across the arguments and see that they have a similar structure. There was in the past, in some idealized nation, a world of companionate partnership from which we’re declining. In the details the ideal partnership of a Left-wing feminist sociologist and a socially conservative Christian obviously differs a great deal, but both feel besieged by the destabilizing and amoral impact of technology and capitalism, which is saturating us with choice, information and plenitude of perversion.

The repulsiveness of modern pornography is not a trivial matter. I do believe that societies need values, that we’re not simple pure hedonic machines (this is a matter of aesthetics and taste, some may differ as to the necessity of this binding of values). But we need to keep some perspective. Foot binding, corsets and shotgun marriages were parts of the cultural landscape in the past, without the influence of porn. More fundamentally I think Left-wing and conservative critiques of the modern culture of pleasure are overly alarmed because they neglect the biologically rooted essentialist aspect of the experience. Porn arouses despite the fact they’re pixels on the screen. But it is no substitute for a real flesh & blood person, because the essence of the source of the pleasure matters. Some social conservatives worry that the youth will be “converted” to homosexuality. The mainstream generally rejects this perspective as ludicrous on the face of it. Graphically, consider the prospect of a straight male receiving oral sex from a male as opposed to a female. On low-level hedonic grounds one would assume that there is no distinction, but many would demur and say that it was “different.” Similarly, pornography can never replace a real relationship.

Technology and the market, the radical and rapid turnover over lifestyles and choices, make people rightly fearful. But as I suggest above despite our biologically rooted fear of change things are getting better. Of course not all change is always for the good, but to actually differentiate the good from the bad, we need to remain rooted in the real world.

Note: Most of the studies I’ve seen which show that perverts have viewed the grossest of porn don’t establish the arrow of causality. That is, if you’re a pervert obviously you are going to seek perversion by definition. Though arguably exposure to perversion can render you a pervert, I see no reason why this has to be the null.

* The sacralization of all aspects of life is not exceptional or atypical, I simply observe that a lot of the references to it operate in its own universe of meaning which is pretty opaque to outsiders.

Emotional contagion in soccer penalty shootouts: Celebration of individual success is associated with ultimate team success.

“We examined the association between celebratory responses after successful soccer penalty kicks and the outcome of a penalty shootout. Individually displayed post-shot behaviours in penalty shootouts held in World Cups and European Championships (N = 151) were rated on the presence of universally distinct and recognizable behaviours associated with positive emotions. Using chi-square analyses we investigated which behaviours were associated with winning the shootout, when the relative standing between the teams was equal. Players who engaged in certain celebratory post-shot behaviours were more likely to be in the team that ultimately won the penalty shootout. In particular, celebrations including both arms were associated with winning the shootout. It was more likely that the next kick taken by an opponent was missed after a player displayed these behaviours after a goal than when he did not. The findings are interpreted in terms of emotional contagion – that is, the transference of emotions from individuals onto teammates and opponents. It is suggested that the individual expression of post-performance emotions serves a direct purpose in enhancing future team performance and that emotional contagion is an important process in the context of elite sport performance.”

Image: flickr/popofatticus

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