I'm not sure if anybody suspected that rats reacted differently to how men and women smell, but only women were allowed to work as rodent caretakers or be in the rodent room at my school. Our professor showed the guys the room once, but we weren't allowed to talk, since she thought it was men's voices that set the rodents on edge.
In case anybody is wondering what our experiment was, we were measuring whether caffeine affected the VO2 of mice. Their oxygen consumption pegged anytime any of the guys handled them.
Or do they just publish, "X caused effect Y"?
Frankly, identifying why it requires a female, or female non-cat owner sounds like it may be more interesting than whatever other result they are working on...
I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed.
A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures.
Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677-fear-of-a-smell...
Couldn't it also be possible that rodents reacting like that is the result of established practices? I.e.: Rodents get only handled by females, rodents adapt to that female smell while reacting differently to the male smell due to its unfamiliarity?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2616610
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3696469
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18463628
SSC wrote an article about it:
This is a fascinating issue.
Don't be evil.
Does that help? ;)
Now some of those students may have published work as part of their senior capstone, however it's pretty unlikely. You need a lot of knowledge to get to the point where you can publish something meaningful in biology. If you were to publish a work as an undergrad, you are probably working on a professor's project or with a less complicated topic.
It's naive to think all of them can be controlled, even in simple animals as mice
There’s a reason psych has a bigger reproducibility problem than any other field.
Worse: isn't this always true? Specific breed of mice, humans working with them, temperate, trace differences in food, light patterns, sounds (including sounds beyond human range)...
That said, you do learn not to act 100% confident. You need to say "This suggests that" instead of "This proves that", etc.
Anyway, the solution to reliable data is simple: Have multiple competing groups try to repeat the work as closely as possible.
Now that you have something to hang your hat on, you come up with some theory/model to explain the phenomenon. Even better, come up with multiple competing such models. From these you deduce some precise prediction that is checked against future data.
All of this was well known a few generations ago...
Charlatan fortunetellers aren't owed careers as scientists -- if they can't produce reliable, predictive models because they utterly fail to control experiments,then they should have their careers destroyed.
We've seen enough damage from corporate leaders and politicians relying on guides to reading chicken entrails masquerading as science.
It's time to stop the fraud.
Let's call it 'science' and 'hunches'. (I'm sure marketing people would think of a better name.) There's nothing stopping you from publishing hunches; there's nothing stopping the same journals from publishing science and hunches. It would just be the case that we'd treat publishing a hunch as science as fraud, because you're outright lying about how sure you are.
It is the case that several fields would get (almost entirely) moved from science to hunches, but that would be good! The label will match what's inside.
If we have this split in the product lines, if we have these two tiers (models where we're really sure and complex systems where we only have a working hunch), then we should just own it and put that on the tin.
All I'm asking is people stop labeling composite wood as lumber -- and understandably, a lot of people selling composites act like that would make the sky fall.
Hardly, there's a real demand for both products and both serve a real need. Let's just be honest in our marketing and stop conflating the two.
If it was a strict trade-off, I would agree that the answer was somewhere on the middle. But it isn't. Most of the things that give you precision will also give you accuracy. The few things that let you exchange one for the other look too much like cheating, and seem to always have much greater impacts on accuracy than on precision.
This is absolutely false - digital clocks are a common example. Precise to the second (or millisecond, or more!) but only as accurate as their setting.
Calculations also give precision without accuracy, like my package of tortilla chips - 13oz (368.5g) They took a measurement or specification precise to the ounce, multiplied by 28.3495, and got 368.5.
Accuracy and precision are independent variables, and the utility of either is usually limited to the order of magnitude of the other. With either "accurate to the second with a precision of milliseconds", or "accurate to the millisecond with precision to the second", you should only report a measurement to the second (or possibly a more precise measurement with an error range).
Do they have different meaning to you? They are the same thing unless there is some scientific meaning that makes them different of which I'm not aware. i.e. Theory in Science means a different thing than what it means to a layman person.
In common usage, these words mean the same thing, but scientists often give words specific meanings in order to make their research and ideas less ambiguous.
Definitions are even more important in non-scientific fields such as philosophy or math where meaningful reasoning of abstract structures and ideas would be next to impossible without giving them concrete definitions and stating your assumptions.
Remember that definitions are arbitrary, so to understand an author's argument or idea, you must seek out the author's definitions.
Hopefully that clarifies some of the discussion going on in the comments here.
[1] pre·ci·sion: noun the quality, condition, or fact of being exact and accurate.
[2]ac·cu·rate (of information, measurements, statistics, etc.) correct in all details; exact. "accurate information about the illness is essential" synonyms: correct, precise, exact, right, error-free, perfect; More
But it's inaccurate by many hours because you haven't set it yet.
If you're target shooting, and all of your shots go through the same hole: that's precision.
If that hole is several inches away from the bullseye, it's precise but not accurate.
What I found:
* It is a science story about findings presented at a meeting. The story is published in Nature, which does do very prestigious peer reviewed papers, but the findings and the story itself are not peer reviewed.
* Within the same institution, the head of the lab repeated the experiment.
* Some other actually peer reviewed papers with female researchers, rats and ketamine show positive influences.
Who says? I get your over all point, but I disagree that only "professionals" can install copper pipes. It really isn't that difficult.
Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher
Absolutely. The statistics are text-book standard, and the research is peer-reviewed and published in a major journal, so as Kahneman said about the now discredited priming studies, "You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."[1]
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents
And possibly not just rodent experiments! We may even want to re-evaluate the weight we put on statistical claims across a broad range of fields. I think Gelman covers it well in his article "I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence": http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-dani...
[1] To Kahneman's credit, in perhaps the most genuine mea culpa I've ever read, he later confessed that he had "placed too much faith in underpowered studies": https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
Another similar problem was mice in maze experiments, which also could not be repeated. The experimenters were using mazes with sand on the floor rather than hard bases, and it turned out that the earlier experiments were not measuring the memories of mice; instead their ability to sense vibrations from their footsteps and helped with location senses.
Because, you know, people were so dumb until social-constructivism landed on Earth like the Messiah no-one expected. And we need to be re-educated. Or else.
What baffles me most is the insistence that one can build any kind of objective distinction based on subjective experiences, that is, what one feels. We're all capable of sadness, joy, excitement, and what not. But we can not build any kind of categorization (read diversity) of people based on these concepts/states of mind. I don't identify as sad, although I'm sad from time to time. No one does. Companies can not be forced to hire more sad people, for the sake of diversity. Yet, now, it's compulsory to have more people hired because they report some sort of internal and inaccessible state of mind which they express using words used for categorizing people based on the shape of their genitalia.
The only thing that's funny is that on a thread about lab rats reacting differently to male or female lab workers, people feel the need to start a holy war about topics as pointless as this one.
But one assumes that in this case the cause might be that the pheromones that people all hopped up on testosterone give off is different those given off by people who aren't .... those people would likely be cis-males, trans-males who've transitioned, trans-females who haven't transitioned, and some trans people who are currently transitioning in either direction .... we don't really have one exact word that encompasses those categories
And the researchers can be taking drugs changing their smell, possibly changing the mice behaviour.
As for why rats may develop the ability to sequence XX vs XY - if rats with the ability to do so were killed far less than those without, then rats would quickly evolve the ability to do so. This could happen if males were the ones killing rats and not females. Actually, skip the 'probably not' I began with - it's a perfectly likely explanation that may or may not be true based on further study.
It's still a developing field of study, but AFAIK the current thinking based on the evidence is that gender roles are largely social constructs while gender identity is at least partly based in biology (that is, the brain has some innate conception of gender even if many of the implications of those genders are filled in by society). And sexual orientation is yet another separate thing.
IIRC the nature-nurture studies show that nature is atleast 50% of the cognitive result on growing up. Atleast since the studies also binned a lot of stuff into "nurture" without much consideration as long as it's not nature. It might be more.
Thinking that gender is a purely social construct is just backwards to everything we've discovered in modern science. People can be gay because of their upbringing but most of the time that is just how they are. Same with transsexuality, it's mostly how people are not how they want to grow up, which should receive utmost respect. (though on the other hand, if CRISPR advances more we might have a "gay cure" and a "trans cure". Especially the ethical debate of a "trans cure" would be interesting)
> Some of this feminist/transhuman thinking, [...] are not rooted in reality
Luckily not all feminists. My sister has been one of those hardcore feminists but after having a situation in which she had to decide between getting a good grade and fighting for injustice against women, she changed her attitude that she should not fight against injustice like that if she can't uphold her principles in all situations.
Her reaction to this study now, relaxed, would probably have been different a year ago. I think a lot of people might react badly to the study and I'll keep an eye on it.
Reactions to studies are a study of humans in of itself already, observing the acceptance of data by a specific group can tell a lot about a group. Like pheromones can tell a rat a lot about a person.
In general I don't think it's as simple as being one way or the other, some people certainly seem to innately feel they were born into the wrong gender, and just want that set right, while there seem to be other people for whom it seems to be fluid, that want to be able to choose and change. I don't see it's much of any of the rest of our business other than we should make them welcome in society just like anyone else.
As far as it being a 'social construct' I think the whole thing that "people with XX chromosomes must be women and people with XY must be men, or alternatively people born with penises ...." is obviously a social thing - likely tied to rigorous western sex roles and trying to force people into them - other cultures have provided places for people with differing genders - Fa'afafine, Hijra etc and traditionally treated them differently than in the west ... so yes definitely a 'social construct'
https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/
When people think of each other as blank slates and make progressivism the only acceptable viewpoint, maybe those inclined towards social conservatism just come out doing this "progressive in name only" thing, LARPing the themes of the last century in lieu of a consistent set of values.
>If you’ve ever taken antibiotics, had a vaccine, a blood transfusion, dialysis, an organ transplant, chemotherapy, bypass surgery or joint replacement, you have benefited from animal testing and research. In fact, practically every drug, treatment, medical device, diagnostic tool or cure we have today was developed with the help of lab animals.
>Many diseases that once killed millions of people every year are now either preventable, treatable or have been eradicated altogether. Immunizations against polio, diphtheria, mumps, rubella and hepatitis save countless lives and the survival rates for many major diseases are at an all-time high thanks to the discovery of new drugs and the design of sophisticated medical devices and surgical procedures.
But the linked video isn't about that at all. It's about the pitfalls of using rodents for testing and trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from the results. In other words, an argument that is squarely on topic with regard to the original article. Or in other words further, that using rodents is "a horrible testing method"―to repeat what the original commenter wrote before you derailed the thread.
Your commenting as if this discussion is about the ethics of animal testing and the comments of you and those who've responded (including the one I'm writing now!) have been—and are contributing further—to a massive waste of effort and attention.
For example, say that we have genuinely useful medical information as a result of Unit 731 experiments and similar crimes (which may or may not be the case; I have no idea). There's no contradiction if one person supports using those existing results to save lives while simultaneously opposing further collection of such results.
Another example: I personally eat a lot of meat (keto/LCHF), but even so I might support legislation to ban killing animals for food or sport, because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change.
This is the reason why. You may prefer the world to be a certain way, but you aren't willing to make any sacrifice to make it be a particular way, so it appears that you don't actually care about an opinion that you are espousing.
People who don't eat meat have a net effect on a reduced demand for meat, reducing the amount of cattle. Becoming a vegetarian doesn't stop everyone eating meat, but it helps.
[I'm not a vegetarian but I have some respect for people who are willing to stand by their beliefs]
For me, I see the greatest impact I can personally make as continuing to work to become successful and then investing a ton of money into lab-grown meat.
Anyway, it's something I'd like to help do something about, but it's not my life's focus. If I had a magic "make everyone stop eating meat" button, I'd be tempted to press it and figure out a way to personally adapt, but ultimately I think that would cause more harm than good without a market-ready drop-in replacement that fits the same macros. That's not the same as not caring or being unwilling to make a sacrifice; it's just caring about multiple things to varying degrees and being realistic.
Says who? OP is willing to make a sacrifice that results in desired effect - just not "any" sacrifice, which in this case does nothing.
If I think taxes should be lower, should I start paying less tax then I am asked to?
Would you like to know whether that scientist is male or female? Does it matter? Go see the video.
On we go: “Everyone knows testing on rodents is practically the same as doing actual human trials”. Actually, no competent researcher thinks that. I’ll grant that it’s a fairly common misconception in the media, and one that’s definitely worth addressing.
But it’s disingenuous and counter-productive to do this by creating other misconceptions — namely about what science is (see above), and that scientists are somehow oblivious to the (very obvious!) deficiencies of animal testing. That doesn’t mean that mouse model research is useless — far from it (unfortunately). It’s a crucial first step in a lot of biological and medical research.
To be sure, Dr Raza — as an expert — makes excellent points! But so does the FDA when it mandates animal trials before human trials: Adam points to an example where a drug went to human trials and almost killed the patients even though it was safe in mice. OK. Now imagine how often that would happen if we didn’t have preliminary mouse studies.
That said, all (!) animal research scientists I know support stronger regulations on mouse research. And, although I can’t speak for the US, the regulations are already a lot stricter in the UK and Germany than claimed in Adam’s video.
So.. it really doesn't matter who teaches and who listens, because ultimately they're both actors reading from a script. How does that play in favor of your argument?
Not to mention the woman he's explaining to is a scientist researcher, and at the end of the video, they have Dr. Azra Raza as a guest (who is also a woman) to further solidify the arguments.
If you think you're defending anything by calling it "mansplaining" and complaining that women aren't treated fairly, you're wrong and you're not helping anyone.
woman: "<erroneously> science says X"
man : "<correcting her> actually the truth is Y"
The jerk also talks-down to us the audience. It's terrible science-education and it's not "humor"
"mansplain" is a gender-biased criticism of behavior. It implies that the gender of the participants is the problem, rather than the attitudes or behavior.
But apparently the mice in the study react to the gender, so maybe it's germane...
Else, it sounds like someone beat up their data until they found something worth publishing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time such an effort passed a "peer review."
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...