First of all, on some level, the mere existence of a show on this topic annoyed me. Testosterone is just so over-exposed. Testosterone is a sexy hormone, and by that, I don’t mean that it is a sex hormone or that it is responsible for the sex drive. I mean that people love talking about it, thinking about it, writing about it, and attributing all sorts of amazing qualities to it.

Testosterone — “T” — is also trendy in certain circles. In the Bay Area, lots of former dykes are now on T. Lesbians used to complain that their exes were all dating men, reminding me of some of my ex-boyfriends who used to complain that all their exes were now dating women; now in a new iteration on an old refrain, it is not uncommon to hear people comment on how their exes have all become men.

It’s also incredibly romanticized. We live in a T-centric world. All kinds of amazing powers are attributed to T. People talk about testosterone like it’s the hormone. Testosterone is the love drug, the drug of energy, enthusiasm, passion — even physics, as I heard on Sunday. A real wonder drug.

Also, and I too am guilty of this, testosterone is virtually the definition of masculinity. How do we describe men who are macho to the point of annoyance, or who exhibit negative traits we associate with masculinity, such as sexism, aggression, overbearing conversational styles, or arrogant unquestioned cockiness? Victims of testosterone poisoning.

So, T racks up tons of publicity, good and bad, in a rather unpleasant recapitulation of everything to do with manliness and this male-centric world. We define the rest of the hormonal world in relation to T, it sometimes seems. We are all T-totalizers, we have all drunk the T.

For instance, one of the speakers yesterday talked about how he felt when a medical condition zeroed out his T. This was totally interesting, Oliver Sacks-level interesting: He walked around the world, feeling passionless and disinterested, but had a generalized objective aesthetic appreciation of everything. Everything was “beautiful”, but he didn’t care about any of it. He could lay in his bed for hours without doing anything. In the entire segment, neither this speaker nor the host, Ira Glass, ever discussed how this compared, or not, to the experiences of people with other hormone deficiencies. Of course, zeroing out almost any hormone or important chemical can produce some strong effect — and the same or similar effect can be produced by zeroing out thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), serotonin, and probably others as well.

Similarly, T’s role in the public mind is as the arbiter and definer of sex and secondary sex characteristics. The presence or absence of T defines one’s masculinity or femininity. Sometimes women get a little “equal time”: testosterone defines men, estrogen defines women. Even in this more “equal” and “gender-neutral” form, this equation is ridiculous, and false, and deeply skewed. Both formulations — T and not-T; T & E too — utterly ignore complex hormonal cascades and interactions; ignore that testosterone doesn’t act alone and its effects may be exacerbated or minimized or suppressed by other hormones; ignore that secondary sex characteristics are caused by a pattern, a cluster, a profile, a cocktail of hormones — in short, an interaction of multiple hormones. Insulin resistance, for instance, relating to fat and estrogen and blood sugar, causes a number of side effects in women: growth of facial hair, lowered fertility, irregular menstrual cycles. It also leads to symptoms of fatigue and depression that are not dissimilar to those described by the zero-T guy. What’s the interplay between testosterone and insulin, estrogen, and fat? I would have no idea if I only read information from people talking about T the miracle drug.

So, frankly, I’m annoyed with the obsession with “T”. To me it’s like the obsession with all things male. Because we identify testosterone with masculinity (although of course testosterone is present in and essential to women, and estrogen, the “girly” hormone, is present in and essential to men), we think way too much about it. We fetishize it, frankly. T this, T that. Whatever! T is not equivalent to manliness, and neither T nor manliness are the be-all and end-all of interesting conversations in the world. Get over yourselves, T fetishists!

Secondly, the show triggered yet another round of the perennial question “Why don’t people think critically”? Or, paraphased: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I am perpetually surprised and disheartened by the extent to which people fail to critically engage their own beliefs; fail to question and interrogate what they think they understand about their own experiences.

The obvious example is religion. How many of the people who claim to believe in some aspect of religion have seriously interrogated that belief? If they strip away the parts that they were raised with (some would say brainwashed as children), and then question it, do they come back to their beliefs? I’m certain some of the people who critically interrogate their beliefs do come back to some of their beliefs, while many do not. I’m equally certain that the vast, vast majority of people who claim to believe in God, or in Jesus, have never even seriously considered the alternative. The real alternative, not “going to hell”.

But this failure to question is true of so many other beliefs. And it is by no means limited by political opinion. My partner recently ran into someone who had been pro-choice, and was now pro-life, after having had children. Her original pro-choice “belief” came from what, and where? Apparently, unquestioned assumptions and ideas. While “pro-choice”, and pre-pregnant, she had never actually challenged herself with the idea that many women would feel inclined to love the fetus developing inside them, that our concepts of “life” and “human life” are slippery slopes, and other pro-life arguments. So when she had a new experience — pregnancy — it significantly challenged her ideas and beliefs. She properly adjusted her “beliefs” to account for her new experience — but she still didn’t engage with the ideas behind her new (or old) so-called beliefs.

Now, identified as “pro-life”, she has basically recapitulated her pro-choice experience. She hasn’t considered the questions of autonomy, the fact that many women have very different emotional responses to their pregnancies, the fact that women may have very different financial and economic and life situation realities that affect their pregnancies, and other pro-choice arguments.

I simply can’t take seriously the professions of belief of people like that. I take the experiences she had while pregnant seriously — that she loved her baby, wanted her baby, felt it as a cherished human life — but how can you take seriously the arguments and beliefs of someone who hasn’t taken their own beliefs seriously enough to examine them?

Another example. I’ve known a number of feminist women who, once they had children, began talking about how girls and boys are intrinsically different. Even as their children were watching TV and going to daycare and being exposed to a myriad of adults with beliefs and attitudes about girls and boys, all of which shape even infant behavior — even then, as soon as they encountered different behaviors in their boy and girl children, they overthrew their “beliefs” about nature versus nurture, gender socialization, essentialism, and so on. These are hardly experimental conditions, but they felt that their own experiences were different than their beliefs, so they adjusted their beliefs.

Apparently, they had never challenged their own beliefs. Their beliefs were, at least in some part, more ideology than reasoned position. They hadn’t seriously considered that of course their own boy and girl children were going to behave in a gendered fashion, even though they were being raised in a feminist home. Perhaps they were unwilling to consider that there are possible differences in the sexes, or that hormones make a difference. So when confronted with gender differences, that they couldn’t clearly attribute to their own parenting, they turned directly back to the old sexist standards of essential, biologically-based, differences between the sexes. Disregarding many plausible explanations, they chose explanations for no real reason that I can see, other than that these were more familiar and more comfortable.

Note, I’m not stating whether there are, or are not, such differences. There certainly may be such differences, based on different times or levels of hormone exposures, or other biological differences. But how on earth can we know, at this point, from raising our children? Children who, with every waking moment, are confronted with images of girls with long hair and dresses, sitting or sewing, or using dolls, and with pictures of boys with short hair and dungarees, playing or running or doing sports or holding swords. Little girls whose decor in their bedrooms includes dolls and statues of girls and women that have no function but to wear some colorful “native” costume. Every picture of a girl holding flowers and every picture of a boy engaged in some active pursuit is information that helps kids build their images of “types” of people that are male and female.

And then of course kids’ behavior is responsive to people who coo “oh aren’t you the prettiest little thing?” or say in a chipper tone, “oh I bet you’re going to be a politician when you grow up!” And then of course when the kids are two or three or four they start figuring out that they, too, are one or the other of those “types” of people. And most kids are eager to define themselves in relation to the world, and you’d sort of expect them to be happy to find a really important identity that they can claim even as very little people.

But how on earth can anyone conclude, from observing the behavior of children immersed in a gendered world, that gender has to do with biology (and biological environment) rather than social environment? It’s utterly beyond me. Sadly, it leads me to the conclusion that the certainty about gender non-essentialism that people displayed before their children (“BC”) was as unquestioned as the certainty about gender essentialism that they displayed after their children were born (“AC”).

I’m picking on folks who share my current or former beliefs, of course, because that’s my example set (and what’s interesting to me). But obviously my friends and acquaintances are simply manifesting the human tendency to see patterns, and to fit evidence into patterns. Society has given us a lot of preexisting patterns: Racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, xenophobia, self-centeredness … So in the absence of rigorous questioning and critical examination of these patterns or frames or preexisting beliefs and ideas, we’re going to fall back on them. Every time. Sexism and racism are always there to provide ready explanations for experiences that don’t fit within our less-well-thought-out “beliefs”. If we have areas of our beliefs that are not well thought-out, where we just “accepted” an idea or assumption without really questioning it — well, then, we will, inevitably, some day encounter information that contradicts those accepted ideas. At those times, some people ignore the evidence and take a “leap of faith”, acknowledging that their faith is irreconcilable with the evidence (ignoring contradictory evidence is also popular, as is lying to oneself about contradictory evidence). Other people fall back on ready pre-made explanations, like gender essentialism.

So I heard more of the same on “This American Life” on Saturday. The second segment was an interview with Griffin Hansbury, a transman who initially began transitioning by taking a superhigh dose of testosterone; this was juxtaposed with the first segment, the guy with the medical disorder that led to zero testosterone. I really respect Ira Glass for many things, although he drove me friggin’ nuts on this episode, and this is an example of brilliant editing and production: An incredibly interesting slice of people with differing experiences around testosterone.

So the transman, formerly identified as a butch dyke, comes on and talks about how T transformed his life and experience. Now, on T, his libido is very high and almost uncontrollable; he has trouble controlling his desire to ogle women on the streets; he suddenly developed an interest in science and he understood physics so much better (this was especially annoying and I will explain shortly). For me, this segment was nothing new: I’ve read a number of articles from transmen extolling the virtues of T, and simultaneously lamenting the sad state in which they now find themselves. “Oh how I now understand and sympathize with adolescent boys.”

Ira Glass’s response to his guest completely pissed me off. Because listening to Glass, he was so obviously caught up in the throes of seeing his own experience through the comforting lens of people who reify his experiences, and agree with his prior, perhaps unvoiced, beliefs. And he seemed to happy to talk with a transman and have this mano-a-mano identification, in which he could feel pleased with himself for successfully relating to the transman as just another guy, while simultaneously recognizing the complexities of trans identity. Combining a moment of transcendent political correctness with a moment of utter masculine self-absorption. It was the nerdy, PC, literate guy version of the fist-knocking moment that Pam Noles wrote about a year and a half ago — men, essentially, congratulating themselves for being men. Honestly the whole tenor of their chuckling interaction annoyed the fuck out of me, even as I felt ruefully happy for Hansbury that he could have this moment of sexist privilege.

Back to “T is the center of the universe and all things good or sexy or uncontrollable in ways that women just can’t understand”: The guest tried to cover his ass by saying that of course he didn’t know that T caused these feelings, but they happened when he started taking T; he left it to the audience and Ira Glass to draw the obvious inference. A correlation! OMG CAUSATION !!!!

Neither Ira Glass nor the guest explored this correlation at all, or considered whether, you know, maybe correlation doesn’t always really equal causation? Neither of them considered, even briefly, whether one’s own sexist assumptions — because all of us have sexist assumptions, even if we’re feminist — would affect one’s expectations of and therefore experience of taking testosterone.

The science and physics thing outraged me as a perfect storm of muddled thinking. Okay, so the guy developed an interest in science, when he started taking testosterone. Which certainly also coincided with the time when his visible appearance was changing and causing more people to interact with him as a man, and his own identity was reshaping itself around being this thing called “a man”.
As for his new “ability” with physics, well, interest goes a long, long way toward creating ability. I accepted long ago that I just am not going to really understand things until and unless I’m interested in them. I don’t understand accounting or tax law now, and I really didn’t understand poetry even the slightest bit until I got interested in it.

Now, there are multiple perfectly plausible explanations for Hansbury’s newly found interest in science — in addition to “testosterone directly changes my brain so that I can have manly interests and understandings”, two other highly plausible explanations suggest themselves: social influences caused by changes in his physiological appearance, and his own attitudes about masculine interests asserting themselves. You know, that while interacting as an equal with a bunch of people who grew up being expected to like science, he started to share their interests. Or that, in coming to see himself and see that others saw him more as a “man”, he started to become more interested in things that he has been taught since infancy to associate with manliness. Who knows what combination of factors were at work in this one individual, affecting his interest in science?

But rather than saying “this is my experience” and “here are several possible reasons”, he suggested, and apparently believes for himself, the explanation that correlates most neatly with sexist ideas that continue to have popular currency. The ideas themselves — that men have some innate ability for mathematics or spatial reasoning, possibly caused or influenced by hormones — are, unquestionably, widely accepted; but they are hotly disputed by scientists who work in the field. So maybe there’s a fire there, or maybe it’s more sexist and racist smoke of the sort so beautifully debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, Carol Tavris in The Mismeasure of Woman, Anne Fausto-Sterling in Sexing the Body, and any number of other excellent works on the science of “essential” race and gender differences. Either way, Ira Glass and his guests just blew more smoke, failing to critically interrogate any of the ideas embedded in their “stories”.

It’s not a really big leap to at least consider these kinds of things, but instead the two men chuckled to themselves about how awful it was that they were betraying their feminist principles by speaking these unpalatable and politically incorrect truths aloud, setting us back a hundred years.

The good news is they haven’t set us back at all. They have just continued to move forward in the same old way that so many people do, changing their old unexamined “beliefs” for new unexamined beliefs, without critically thinking or challenging any of their old or new assumptions along the way. The bad news is that nice, “feminist”, politically correct guys can be, and often are, just as uncritical and unthinking as people brainwashed into religion as children.

We all know that women like pink and men prefer blue, but we have never really known why. Now it emerges that parents who dress their boys in blue and girls in pink may not just be following tradition but some deep-seated evolutionary instinct.

I guess “evolution” waxes and wanes with the fashion trends of the centuries, because in the US in the 19th & early 20th centuries pink was the boys’ color (because it was a type of red, a strong masculine color!) and blue was the girls’ color.

So many possible responses to this utter blithering idiocy. I don’t know whether I’m madder at the Times (and other press) for reporting this crap uncritically, or whether I’m madder at the evolutionary psychologists who, in all seriousness, confirm their own social prejudices as eagerly as did the phrenologists and racist European skull-measurers of the 19th century.
update: of course, the bloggers & commenters of the world have already hit this one: the comments on the London Times article are largely insightful; bad science.net is snarky & gives historical context also; broadsheet @ salon.com had a little detail & a lot of commentary, but surprisingly, didn’t jump on the stupidity quite as much as they really could have.

update: broadsheet had the best headline: Chaste women + promiscuous men = impossible and some good commentary too in the article and one or two helpful points in the comments. Unfortunately, most of the commenters are stuck on arguing about the differences between median and mean (average), quibbling about the math professor’s take, and failing to understand that (a) the NYT article just did a sloppy representation of what the math professor said; and (b) at least some part of what the math professor is really getting at is the popular understanding and use of such studies (including frequent media stories). (Many of the commenters have fallen into the trap of never going back to the source to try to figure out what they’re talking about, so they’re arguing about misquotes and misunderstandings of third-generation reports about data. No wonder there’s confusion about median and mean.)

The NYT article of course didn’t help clarify anything about median or mean (that is after all part of the problem that leads to the necessity of the math professor speaking up) but they did, to their credit, get the lede implication right: The thing this really casts doubt on is the big, all-encompassing theories of human nature that argue that men are inclined to X, and women inclined to Y, because of their y and x genes respectively. So, the numbers in the surveys could be right or wrong, but the conclusions about “women’s nature” and “men’s nature” are not well-supported by relying on the median. It would have been cool if they had talked about the implications of mean and median for social sciences behavior: Are averages or medians more susceptible to social pressures, for instance? Seems plausible that those numbers would have different artifacts but I don’t know, and the NYT didn’t help.

Anyway, as the professor suggested, the numbers have to be off somewhere, because while, yes, mean and median are different, you’ve still gotta make those numbers reconcile somehow. In other words, if median and mean are different, then there have to be differences in mean among subgroups that generate the median. In other words, if most women are more chaste than most men, then some women have to be having a lot more sex than either most women or men.

The most recent survey (NCHS 2007 survey of sex & drug behavior of US adults) that precipitated this discussion showed that 29% of US men report having 15 or more female partners, and 9% of women report having 15 or more male partners. It’s a little difficult to imagine that the 9% of women have so many more partners than the 29% of men, on average, that they make up for the 91% of women who had fewer … My guess is that there is greater variability among female sex habits, that there is some real, intentional fudging in the self-reported data, and that there is some methodological and definitional problems in how men and women define sex (I’m thinking of rape: I know that some people forced to have sex nonconsensually would not “count” that person as a sex partner, whereas it seems plausible that the rapist might well count their victim as a sex partner, especially if the rapist didn’t so self-define).

The greater variability point, if true, is itself interesting: Since “greater variability” shows up so frequently in sociobiological arguments about there being more male geniuses and idiots, you’d think the “greater variability” argument would be of interest to them in the realm of sexual behavior, too.
update: slate covered it too, with the mean/median point. while focusing on the trees, slate managed to notice the forest in a single paragraph toward the end.

So some good will come out of this incident: that a bajillion people will have heard the words “fair use” and been inspired to participate in discussions about open content, fair use, control of information, etc.

I really, really hope that people do *not* take the lesson that if the publisher had not apologized and “granted permission” that the original figures would have had to stay down. This was a classic example of the chilling effect that comes from cease and desist letters. In other words, a classic example of the growth of copyright paranoia.

The law is actually on the blogger’s side on this issue. That blogger would have been well within rights to completely ignore the C&D to begin with because this was as fair use (as many people pointed out). Wiley would have then had to do a s.512 notice to the ISP (scienceblogs.com) which would also have been within its rights to ignore the notice. They could have then filed a 512(f) suit against Wiley for a bad faith s.512 notice, and EFF or any number of attorneys would have been delighted to take them on as pro bono clients, I’m certain.

My point: These incidents raise questions about the growth of copyright and whether copyright should be usefully applied to certain kinds of knowledge and how public investments in scientific research should be monitored. But they also raise simple questions of the abuse and misuse of copyright law — misuse which is illegal in some circumstances and can cost the misuser a lot of money.

I’d like to see in-house counsel advising their “junior staff” about the possible liability for misusing its copyrights. A few more high-profile cases might put that in their list of important topics to cover in their in-house trainings.

Sigh. Remember Gina Kolata? She was good. Why can’t we have good science writing again? (In fairness, the single line from the Wade article that annoyed me the most wasn’t Wade’s, but a quote from J. Michael Bailey: “If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” Indeed. Because when I think about how to raise a gay man the first option that occurs to me is cutting off his penis. Jackass.)

The video is also annoying: My invisible lesbian partner and I sat with open-jawed amazement as they talked about straight boys, gay boys, straight girls, and … let’s move on to another topic altogether, the sweaty t-shirt experiment (No, not the menstrual cycle-synching armpit sniffing experiment; the women sniffing men’s sweaty tshirts that shows that women may develop even emotional attachments to men with different immune systems.) So a total fluff piece with little useful content.

Natalie Angier’s article on sexual desire, as ever, is much better. (I especially liked the quote from the psychologist in her 50s: “Listening to Noam Chomsky always turns me on.” I hear ya, sister.) Angier treats some of the same subjects as Wade, but much more reasonably. Wade reports that scientists have found X, we now know Y, and other very definitive statements of Objective Scientific Truth. He describes the experiment in the terms of the conclusion, thus making it appear foregone, unquestionable, certain. By contrast, Angier describes experiments in detail, pulling out the findings, and then labeling the assumptions and hypotheses. She reports the uncertainties as well as the findings and (tentative) conclusions. The reader has a chance to understand the experiment and draw their own conclusions, and compare those to the conclusions of the scientist or commentator or writer of the article. … And she’s not just a better science writer, she’s actually a better writer. Her prose is actually enjoyable to read.

Bay Windows (the New England lgbt paper), and the Ottawa Citizen, got a different perspective from one of the authors, grad student Meredith Chivers, who described it as “ludicrous” to “reduce sexual orientation to a question of sexual arousal”. She also added that she and her coauthors “disagree[d] about the definition of sexual orientation. … I think the study shows that sexual orientation is a multifaceted and complex psychological construct and sexual arousal is only one part of that construct.”

Finally, commenting directly on the NYT coverage, she said:

I think the negative response to the New York Times article headline is warranted. I hope that people who are active in this controversy will also read the original article with an unbiased mind, so that they can decide for themselves, rather than unequivocally accept the information the media has provided thus far.

I hope so, too, but in fact most people won’t have access to Psychological Science ["The page you requested is only available to APS members"]. Without open access to the scientific literature, we must rely solely on science reporting. Which is why accurate reporting that captures nuance rather than elides it is so crucial.

update 8/15: americablog posted on 7/6 some interesting details about the study’s main author, Dr. J. Michael Bailey.

Related posts: Bi Lies (7/5)

“Sadly, people who support RU-486 apparently believe the risk of death is preferable to having a child.”

Wright’s politicized sorrow obscures the facts, some of which are included in the NYT article. It turns out that these two deaths are from infection after RU-486 abortion, and, statistically, the deathrate from infections after childbirth and abortion remains consistent across procedures and methods. [The NYT article fails to mention anything in response to this misleading quote; I would have thought that the risk of death from 'having a child' would have been appropriate here. The risk of long-term health problems, considerably greater for childbirth than for any method of abortion, might also have improved the article. But ranting about the NYT is a task for another day. For many other days.]

Politicized Research

The statistics are unsurprising, but in the politicized world of abortion statistics you would have difficulty verifying the data, or trying to flesh out Ms. Wright’s statement. For instance, if you googled something like ‘childbirth abortion mortality rates’, you could see that Google has been successfully bombed by a flood of political sites on the topic (largely anti-abortion). You have to get to the second page of results before you actually start seeing any material from the medical community.

A search of PubMed proved much more helpful. The scientific literature largely treats abortion, pregnancy, and birth control as part of a continuum of family planning and reproductive outcomes — what I’ll call the reproductive medicine approach. This makes sense. Research that seems tailor-made to proving somebody’s point about abortion (from whatever perspective) is just inherently less trustworthy.

The reproductive medicine approach makes clear that when the government gets involved in restricting women’s reproductive choices there are clear medical consequences: Whatever the risks of specific procedures, techniques, and reproductive outcomes, what’s really risky is lack of access to family planning and contraception. Unplanned pregnancies are, ultimately, the cause of most pregnancy & childbirth-related mortality, by leading to high-risk pregnancy, or in many countries, illegal or quasi-legal abortion. In the US, for instance, restrictions on abortion delay many women’s access to the very safe first trimester abortion, perversely leading to more late-term abortions. But the message from those who would politicize and involve the government in individual medical decisionmaking, is never about healthcare or policy, probably because the healthcare policies they would propose would be unacceptable to most people. Instead, they focus on particular technologies, techniques, and procedures — effectively establishing technological mandates and prohibitions.

Technological Mandates Are Bad Government

It’s almost never a good idea for the government to establish technological mandates. Technological developments are notoriously difficult to second-guess or steer; tech mandates all too often exemplify the law of unintended consequences [Library of Economics, WikiPedia]. Whenever Congress or state legislators try to take aim at specific technologies, they end up effecting a lot of other changes, scattershot. And any technologically specific law is bound to be out of date very quickly.

We usually think of tech mandates & prohibitions in geeky areas, like copyright: the DMCA (thou shalt not tamper with copy protection measures, etc.); DAT (digital audio tape recorder manufacturers shall include copy protection schemes); broadcast flags (thou shalt include broadcast flag recognition technology in video recorders). But the same impulses are clearly at play in the politics around abortion and birth control. And as in copyright, politicians’ attempts to mark out this or that technology, technique or method as sinful and wrong is bad policy. The politicization of this or that reproductive medicine technique (most recently emergency contraception and intact dilation and extraction, or so-called ‘partial-birth abortion’) only hampers attempts to improve reproductive medicine and outcomes for women, infants, and their families.

Abortion is only the most obvious example. Legislators do nobody any favors when they start toying with technological mandates in any field.* Look at the recent Congressional hearings on stem-cell research. Saletan in Slate tried to put a good spin on it: These guys are working really hard & exploring the issues; isn’t that nice? Yeah, that’s nice from a personal growth standpoint, but the problem is these guys are making laws about very specific techniques, and they have no clue what they’re talking about, much less doing. They don’t understand biology, they don’t understand genetics, they don’t understand development.

But Congress members do understand policy-making, and one might argue that they understand ethics. Well, err, anyway, they understand policy-making. So if Congress members feel they must Take Action, then I have a suggestion for them: Do what you know — make policy. Set out broad principles of respect for life (which includes the lives and health of women as well as the lives of their potential children) and autonomy. Fund research into family planning methods that enhance autonomy and health. Make principled statements that are general about no wanton cruelty (or whatever) in harvesting stem cells. Skip the specific tech mandates.

Then Congress could let the NSF & NIH apply those guidelines when funding specific grants. That’s what regulators & grantors are good at: reviewing specific proposals to see if they fall within general guidelines. And Congress could let the courts interpret those terms in the course of litigation. That’s what courts are good at: reviewing the facts of particular cases, heartwrenching, difficult cases, and figuring out how to apply broad principles. And Congress could stop grandstanding and micromanaging cases (like Schiavo) and technologies (anything to do with biology, family planning, and copyright protection is by definition a Bad Idea for Congress to muck with — others no doubt will occur).

follow-up: 2005/7/25: The AP version of the story also pointed out that the women who got the infection and took the drugs may not have followed FDA-approved instructions.

The agency also said the four deaths occurred among women who were treated at clinics that didn’t follow FDA-approved instructions for the two- pill regimen. Although the FDA stressed that it could not prove that the “off- label” use was to blame, its new public health advisory warns doctors of the possible link to such use.

The fifth death followed a ruptured tubal pregnancy, a dangerous condition and type of pregnancy that the drug does not terminate.

Geez. Could the NYT article have been any less informative?

* For that matter, technological mandates & prohibitions really might be considered a subspecies of micromanaging generally. The Terri Schiavo fiasco demonstrates why legislators should stay out of individual cases, and far, far out of medical decisionmaking.

As a rule I don’t think very highly of research on sex differences; research on sexual orientation is even worse, perhaps rivaled in its awfulness only by research on “race” differences. The methodological problems in any study I look at usually dwarf the value of any results. This one, I have no doubt, has similar problems. I predict that in a hundred years all the “gay science” of the 90s & early 2000s will prove to be as fraught with of-the-times misconceptions and ideas as the science of Havelock Ellis and Freud.

… I was going to babble on about the questions & criticisms I had about the results of this research (at least as reported by the NYT) but — well, I really have other things to do. In the meantime tho I get to be amused by snarky comments that point out hilariously obvious problems with research like this. For instance, Avedon Carol, who commented on the bi-lies study by noting that “every dyke I know says gay male porn is the hot stuff.” Yeah.

Related posts: Bi Lies, Reprised (7/27)