On October 12th 2010, Guardian regular Oliver
James posted thisComment is Free web-article on the role of genes in
psychology.
This was around the same time I became aware of the many criticisms
online of Oliver James. He appears to be to psychology what Patrick Holford is
to nutrition – a vocal and popular individual whose every utterance has
scientists up in arms.
I read many of the comments underneath the article and found
the arguments fascinating. I was surprised at just how many people were scathingly
critical of James, not realising then as I now do that mistrust of his claims
is rather widespread. In my opinion this is deservedly so and I was pleased to
see that many others share my criticisms yet frustrated to read several comments
supporting or going even further than James. So on October 14th 2010
I posted the following under the username Pumellhorne:
Is anyone still taking Oliver James seriously? His work
is dubious at best and his research is flawed.
If anyone can show me an example of genetics which doesn't
occur in an environment, or environmental factors which affect a person without
genes I'll start listening to these arguments of convenience.
Later that day
someone calling themselves Badmonkey posted this:
@Pumelhome
ill informed, not what has been
stated and most of all boring
To which I
replied:
@Badmonkey
Incorrect, aggressive and most of all laughable.
Badmonkey then perhaps
decided to attempt a more reasonable post:
@Pumellhorne
It seems pretty clear that you
have a lot of hate for OJ, but on a basis that he says it is all environment,
that is not what he is saying....?
I am puzzled by your vitriol for
someone who has not stated what you claim.
May i suggest some "love
bombing".
Infact i think OJ is trying to
keep it balanced between the two as you (and i for that matter want) but the
way that it is balanced by the evidence is 70% - 30% in the environments favour
thats all not 100% either way and you can't expect to get always nice 50-50
splits i'm afraid it is not the way the world works.
All this was, of
course, interspersed with many other posts by people both for and against
James’ view. I decided to spend some lunch hours responding to this person (see
below) who felt in a position to comment on my feelings based on so little
information. Badmonkey did not reply.
The whole thing was then made rather interesting when Oliver James himself
popped up and commented on the many negative posts about him and taking the
opportunity to tell us he thought he’d “nailed” Stephen Pinker in a live debate.
Not what Stephen Pinker said incidentally and I’ve quoted Pinker’s comment below.
I took the opportunity to question Mr. James, but much like Badmonkey, he
seemed intent only on firing off a noisy salvo before retreating to safety.
Here is my lengthy response to Badmonkey:
@Badmonkey
Quote:
1) It seems pretty clear that you have a
lot of hate for OJ,
2)…but on a basis that he says it is all
environment, that is not what he is saying....?
3) May i suggest some "love
bombing".
4) I am puzzled by your vitriol for
someone who has not stated what you claim.
5) In fact i think OJ is trying to keep
it balanced between the two as you (and i for that matter want) but the way
that it is balanced by the evidence is 70% - 30% in the environments favour
thats all not 100% either way and you can't expect to get always nice 50-50
splits i'm afraid it is not the way the world works.
1) How on Earth do you interpret this: “Is anyone
still taking Oliver James seriously? His work is dubious at best and his research
is flawed” as “a lot of hate”? Perhaps it says something of your own
belligerence that you took it that way.
2) No, on the basis that he is unscientific and that
he makes claims without doing enough research. He sells books on highly emotive
subjects that play on and exacerbate a particular set of stereotypically
left-wing, middle-class fears and I have quite recently become aware of how
often he is wrong. Yet still he somehow manages to retain people’s respect. Also because, as Stephen Pinker put it:
“He is in at the end of a declining field and he is
desperately trying to prop it up. He is rather a boorish individual. He had a
tantrum on air.'”
Whether Pinker is right about the declining field or
not I don’t presume to say, but he’s not the first person to talk about James
losing it in a live debate.
3) May I first remind you that you entered into
debate with me with an aggressive post that attempted to comment, inaccurately,
on the level of my knowledge. Any effort by you to sound reasonable now will
inevitably be tempered by that start.
With wikipedia defining “love bombing” as: “the
deliberate show of affection or friendship by an individual or a group of people
toward another individual” it would seem inappropriate advice for this
situation. I can only assume it’s an attempt at humour by referencing terms previously
used. How drole. If you’re attempting to suggest I’ve been detrimentally
affected by a loveless environment in my childhood and that I’m taking it out
on James I hope you can see how ironic that would be. Perhaps you might also
want to consider how vicious and out of place it is to make allegations about
my parents, especially as your comments are based only on the two very short
comments I made and that you and I are complete strangers.
4) Can something be vitriolic and boring? And I
managed it in just 3 sentences? Amazing!
What is it that you think I’m claiming? Perhaps I was
too minimal. My ‘claim’ would be that the variables psychologists are trying to
remove for empirical study of their theories (genes from one side of the
argument, environment from the other) cannot be removed and that serious
confounding variables will always remain. They are, by necessity, in vivo studies
and due to the factors I’ve mentioned I don’t believe they can properly be
called empirical scientific experiments.
5) Who said it was supposed to be a 50-50 split? Where
are you conjuring that figure from? The only people I’m hearing saying it’s
100-0 splits are some of the people posting on this thread and my comment was
as much aimed at them as at fans of James. Your continuous extruding of my
short sentences into more sinister, bold and inaccurate claims shows a deep
misunderstanding and failure to engage with what’s been presented to you in small
chunks.
Thanks for telling me "how the world works"
though. Very kind of you. And your qualification for this is what exactly? That
you live in it? How unbelievably arrogant and boorish of you.
Although I fail to see how you’ve reached the
erroneous conclusions you’ve based your rebuttal on, I suppose my original
comment could have been a little misleading due to the sparsity of detail I
presented about my opinions, level of education, upbringing (all of which you
seem to have a desire to comment on) so I could forgive your mistakes, if not
your unpleasant attitude. Instead I’ll offer you some assistance in
understanding what I’m saying.
Throwing stats out into the argument like 70% of this
and 30% of that is a nonsense. First let’s consider what you’re trying to
measure. How do you define 70% of a person’s development? As 70% of their age?
Of their brain cells? Of the number of factors which affected them in
childhood? Can you not see how ludicrous that is? How can someone possibly make
a claim that ‘x = y% of z’ when z is as undefined, unique and stubbornly
unfathomable as personality? Do you think Pinker or James fully understand how
the mind is formed? What cognition amounts to? What consciousness is? What goes
into the making up of you or me in childhood? They don’t. No one does.
Discrete numbers are lovely though, aren’t they? They
fit into nice neat rows and you can use them to justify any argument you want
with just a bit of framing and being economic with your input and output.
Unfortunately real people aren’t divided into percentages of development and
can’t be split like that.
Up until Judith Dunn kicked off the research into
sibling psychology in the 1970s the established view was that all children from
the same family were pretty much psychologically identical due to shared
socio-economic conditions. Prof Dunn’s own children didn’t fit this view and
she wondered why. When she found no prior research on the differences of
siblings she started her own. 40 years later there are well-respected people
making a living out of attempts to slice up how much siblings respond to an
environment, sometimes as if they were the same person in separate situations.
I’m saying this is wrong-thinking by James, Pinker and those people on here
arguing about nature vs. nurture as if it could be ‘proved’ either way.
Pinker is wrong because, despite using a scientific
approach, he isn’t allowing for the fact that any studies will inevitably still
occur in a family environment and that the number of confounding variables in
the study will skew any results no matter how much twins look and dress alike
or whether they both married a travel agent named Janet. James is wrong because
no matter how hard he looks at the family environment, which he has made a
living from for a long time now and has a huge vested interest in, there will
always be genetic factors that can’t be isolated. If he was proved wrong he’d
be utterly discredited.
I would say, if pushed, that the whole argument is
flawed and that money is being made on both sides because it’s such an emotive
and marketable issue and that it’s best to treat the whole thing with
suspicion. Time would be better spent on research into how genes and
environment interact and what factors are present in situations of interest to
society. For an example of how environment and physiology (although not
necessarily genes in this case) interact, you might want to look at this TED video of Jim Fallon.
I’m passionate about psychology and I’m frequently
reminded of the barriers that remain between a fundamental issue of psychology
(i.e. that it is a factor in everything we do) and those it could help (i.e.
everybody). Too many people are held up as experts but are no more than quacks.
I don’t hate quacks, I simply have no respect for them and I dislike the way
they subvert progress to line their own pockets.
I think I’ve been more civil with you than you have a
right to expect, Badmonkey, because it’s not my intention to cause rifts for my
own pleasure. I hope to see an end one day to quackery and I hope this clears
up some of your misconceptions.
[end]
Here is Oliver James’ post in the comments:
OWJames
·
Those
who mention The Blank Slate and my Radio 3 argument with Steven Pinker should
listen to it again on www.selfishcapitalist.com.
I
believe that on that occasion I nailed him as unable to produce any evidence
from twin or adoption studies that criminal violence has a genetic component.
Yet in his book, he stated that it does.
Nailing
him did take quite a bit of work because he refused to address my question.
For
those who maintain that I am saying everything is nurture, I would point out
that I accepted that the Thaper study found genes played a role in 16% of cases
(though that needs to be replicated).
Those
saying I ignore epigenetics are ignoring the point I make about the depression
variant in my article - the purest epigenetic finding so far in this field, and
looking increasingly as if it does not hold up.
Oliver
James
My question to
him was this:
But isn't this a case of oversimplification for the sake
of taking a stance?
What is inescapable is that 100% of those with ADHD in
Thapar's study possess genes
and are also constantly immersed in environmental factors. It's a false
dichotomy.
I'm not being facetious, I genuinely fail to see how you,
Stephen Pinker or anyone else can realistically claim to be isolating your
chosen variables sufficiently to say how much they influence development.
Unsurprisingly, there
was no reply from him. Another contributor to the thread, Daen, posted the following, which
very nicely (very technically) addresses some of the issues with Oliver James’ alleged
expertise:
OWJames:
I presume that the depression paper you refer to is Risch et al, "Interaction
between the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), stressful life events, and
risk of depression: a meta-analysis" (JAMA. 2009 Jun 17;301(23):2462-71).
That paper simply considers allelic variation of the serotonin
transporter gene (the SS, SL, or LL genotypes), and not epigenetic
modification at all! It demonstrates considerable confusion on your behalf
that you believe that these things are equivalent.
A
search of PubMed for "epigenetic depression" gives the
recently-published paper from Olivier et al "The age-dependent effects of
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in humans and rodents: A review"
(Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2010 Sep 25), which considers the
huge gap in therapeutic indices between adults and children for the SSRI drug
fluoxetine.
From
the same search: yet another relevant and recent paper on epigenetic effects in
stress-induced psychiatric disorders comes from Uddin et al, "Epigenetic
and inflammatory marker profiles associated with depression in a
community-based epidemiologic sample" (Psychol Med. 2010 Sep 14:1-11).
And
another from Xu and Andreassi, "Reversible histone methylation regulates
brain gene expression and behavior" (Horm Behav. 2010 Sep 15).
And so
on, and so on.
Please,
Dr James: you are evidently deeply unclear about some important aspects of
genetics and should absolutely steer clear of commenting so definitively upon
such an important and potentially controversial area, especially with a
political agenda, until you have gained sufficient knowledge of the subject to
comment precisely and accurately upon it.
And
one more which does a very good job of demolishing your argument, from
Plazas-Mayorca and Vrana, "Proteomic Investigation of Epigenetics in
Neuropsychiatric Disorders: A Missing Link between Genetics and Behavior?"
(J Proteome Res. 2010 Sep 9). I felt this was relevant enough to include the
abstract.
Neuropsychiatric
disorders affect a large segment of the human population and result in large
costs to society. The majority of such disorders have unknown underlying
causes. Recent evidence suggests an important role for epigenetic regulation in
the emergence of neuropsychiatric disease. Epigenetics may provide a link
between genetic and environmental factors and behavior. Epigenetic signaling involves
changes on the structure of chromatin; such changes are often triggered and
maintained by the post-translational modification of chromatin proteins and/or
DNA. Recent proteomic technologies have enabled the study of epigenetic
mechanisms in a high-throughput manner. This review will provide an overview of
the major epigenetic pathways and modern techniques for their study, before
focusing on experimental evidence supporting a strong role for epigenetics in
selected psychiatric disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and drug
addiction. These results highlight a great need for the inclusion of the
proteomic characterization of epigenetic mechanisms in the study of
gene/disease associations in psychiatric disorders.
The next day I spotted
this article by Bob O’Hara (in the Grrl
Scientist blog) in which O’Hara cuts James’ argument to pieces and where James
himself wades in again on the comments thread, but once again declines to enter
into debate after (perhaps a bit aggressively) saying his piece.
The
thread of comments under it is fascinating too. If you’re interested in how and
why inexpert people appear in the press as scientific experts I urge you to read the thread and follow the
links.
Oliver
James has repeatedly been criticised for constructing
and demolishing straw men and for failing to research his topics properly. Yet still
he sells books, writes popular articles for national newspapers and is invited
to take part in important and influential debates.
I’m not
going to question how he’s managing to do this, that issue is dealt with very
well elsewhere. Instead I’ll use this space to make a point.
It’s time
we started taking responsibility for the experts that fill our book shelves and
our airwaves. We choose them by
buying the newspapers they work for, by buying the books they write on subjects
of which we care deeply about but know little, by watching the TV shows offering
them opportunities to tell us how they think things are, and also by failing to
register our dissatisfaction with what they tell us. The internet has given us
the power and the responsibility to check the facts before signing up for them.
We should call out any person who’s argument isn’t backed up by the research in
that field, write to the people employing them or comment on their websites to
make our dissatisfaction known, and
always, always question what they tell
us. Don’t passively accept everything, even from a trusted channel or paper.
And perhaps above all question what the day-job is of the person being paid to
tell you these ‘facts’.
