If experiments on mice really were progressing medicine then the ethical position might change. Unfortunately the experiments discussed above appear aimed only at progressing funding for a trendy area of research, with little prospect of obtaining worthwhile results.

But is it still ethical if the research actually proved worthwhile, also allowing mice to benefit?

There’s probably no record of mice objecting to these experiments and mice would expect equivalent access to any newly developed pharmaceuticals, as would any other species of earth or alien origin, assuming the appropriate forms were filled in with payment by a recognised credit card. For eBay purchases there’d be no way of telling that the customers were mice. Perhaps someone could check on overall transactions. Any unexplained surge in bidding for cheese, treadmills, and cat bells might prove interesting.

Apparently there’s an approaching epidemic of Alzheimers as the baby boomer generation ages. Pretty much everyone will be affected, at least indirectly. Probably many people who will eventually be severely affected have already incurred a great deal of damage earlier in life, but they don’t yet know it. It’s relatively easy to check for signs – just closely examine a handful of your brain tissue next time you’re looking.

I’ve heard that the degenerative effects can be mitigated by learning new skills and continuing to refine and enhance skills as one ages. Something that’s worth doing anyway, but won’t be much use to protect against Alzheimers because it only avoids the slow decline. If the cause remains present then Alzheimers will still develop eventually, just more suddenly and later in life.

If the informed non-experts are right, that Alzheimer’s is a consequence of accumulating damage (glycation), as for various other chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, then it cannot be possible for specialist experts to develop a cure for Alzheimers after it has developed any more than a cure might be possible for a car crash after it has happened, or a cure for any of those other chronic ailments. There can only be prevention.

Pretty much anything to do with Alzheimers research funding will therefore be bad science. The economics require that efforts be applied at the wrong end of the problem, with all hopes pinned on the ensuing patent medicine sales revenue. This article is probably a push for even more futile, but politically correct, funding at the expense of the usual victims.

Best to opt for prevention now, no point in waiting for a cure that can never arrive. Unfortunately there can be zero publicity about the real options for prevention, because there’s no money in it (and because the implications of prevention impacts so heavily on other interests).

SOPA is only a temporary measure. Eventually the cost of policing will dwindle away to nothing. Not only because no one will ever share any information, which means zero costs of policing what amounts to no transactions, but also because once pure copyright protection is finally here then the people will have learnt to arrest themselves.

There will also be no whining and complaints because it will need to be made illegal to criticise such laws for them to work. Rules can only be effective if everyone agrees to them. And eliminating disagreement amounts to the same thing. Complaining would otherwise effectively be encouraging a breach of copyright or counselling someone to undertake an illegal act – which would be an illegal conspiracy. So the people would eventually need to learn to arrest themselves for that too. Once everyone becomes a criminal until proven innocent then there need be no distinction between real criminals and everyone else - hence no crime. So this is also a very effective solution to all crime, and self-policing too.

US politicians are very slow to catch on. It's amazing that US politicians are only now beginning to embrace this approach nearly 100 years after such policies were pioneered by all of the world's communist dictators.

I would like to show my kids the full length feature movie of this.

Why can't the likes of Spielberg and Peter Jackson turn their special 3D effects talents to this project. If they can bring Tintin to life then maybe they could use similar CGI technology to bring life to life.

I think it’s related to activity. People who are confident are preferred as leaders because they get things done.

People really want to believe certain things because it justifies their behaviour and actions.

Some psychologists now argue that reasoned argument follows action. The cause and effect is reversed from what is often assumed. People don’t comprehend things logically and decide to do things. They just do the thing, and then unconsciously rationalise that they intended taking that action.

So perhaps the answer is on the other side of the same coin. Moving on from not knowing towards not doing. Embracing inactivity can also be worthwhile. Not rushing around in a frenzy allows the mind to spin freely and conscious thinking to occur – which is what many people are really afraid of. Thinking can actually hurt.

At the moment I’m experiencing demands that lawns be mowed and floors vacuumed, plus various other thankless and unsatisfying chores that are doomed to remain unappreciated because there’s no achievement or result: no detectible difference in the situation before and after the frenzied activity. It’s more noticeable this time of year when hosting guests in the holiday season. (Summer in Australia.)

Why put all that effort into cleaning up before guests show up? Wouldn’t it make more sense to clean up after they’ve actually been there and have caused some mess?

On the other hand, there’s nothing more satisfying than meaningful work with productive output. E.g. repairing the lawnmower so that it can be started and mowing the lawns when they really do need mowing.

Some of us are not frightened of not doing the unachievable and unnecessary. I think it’s more interesting to be unafraid to live in a world not having wasted too much time doing stupid things. To have not embraced unnecessary and meaningless work for peculiar psychological reasons.

I’d also like to know how to provide comfort to others who are irrationally and unreasonably discontented with this ‘meaningless tasks incomplete’ approach. They’re typically people with a genetic condition, an insufficiently diverse blend of chromosomes, who detest the idea of their partner not incessantly rushing around in an exhausting frenzy of activity, then starting over so that their perceived ‘work’ is never actually ‘done’. Possibly there’s a pharmaceutical option.

There’s plenty of more important things to deal with, e.g. reading rdnet blogs. But this might be off topic. Perhaps belongs in the justified use of violence thread.

Comment 54 by Stephen of Wimbledon

Re research link:

Sorry, not recorded.

My most likely source is a periodic advertising email newsletter from Robert Cialdini's website. He's a pop science writer (among other things, he's also a teacher and researcher, or was). Occasionally he links new research reports that illustrate various themes he's focusing on. I think this code of ethics curiosity was discussed in one of his periodic newsletters several years ago. (Long since deleted at my end.)

It's possible there's a reference remaining on Cialdini's website. They'd probably point you in the right direction of you emailed them. Being professional academics they'd certainly have the original source identified.

Searching on the research databases for the original publication would be difficult. Titles on papers often don't give much of a clue as to what they're about.

I didn't read the original paper myself. But this particular idea involving mental shortcuts is consistent with other well accepted phenomena in social psychology, so it's not really surprising that it's a possible explanation for the peculiar persistence of things like the 10 commandments.

It’s easy to get diverted into the detailed code content. Especially if you’re the kind of person that’s inclined to read support documentation before attempting construction, modifications, or repairs. But hardly anyone in the real world does this. Most people ignore RTFM and get on with the project.

Another approach is to think of the 10 commandments as instructions provided by an alien civilisation. Like the Swedish in the form of Ikea assembly instructions or the Chinglish guide to your latest gadget. The size and number of pages becomes the only relevant item. Hardly anyone bothers to comprehend the details. The practical function of these documents is to indicate there’s more to it than appears and safe and effective usage may not be very obvious. The result is to give pause for thought. i.e. The underlying message is that at least some others experienced difficulties because they’ve done the wrong thing. (So don’t sue us if you hurt yourself because you’re too stupid to make it work.)

It’s also interesting to consider why the 10 commandments even exist:

The Wikipedia article indicates that even the religious institutions don’t find them particularly useful.

Psychologists recently discovered that an awareness of the presence of a list of ethical rules, e.g. some visual or other reminder of the 10 commandments or a professional code etc, has a detectable impact on people’s moral reasoning. But that the detailed content of the code is irrelevant. It’s the existence of the code (and the social proof of the implied message that a substantial number of thoughtful people have agreed with it or have gone to some trouble to codify it) that counts.

This indicates there are positive selection benefits from the existence of formal moral codes. Religious people wouldn’t need to even believe there is a god who will enforce the rules. Suspecting that there are many other people who might believe that they need to help (God or anyone else) enforce the rules is a sufficient threat to compel compliance.

There’s really only 1 single implied commandment that emerges from the mere existence of the entire set of 10: that the world is complex, you are prone to making mistakes, and that you may need to give some thought to how you behave. (i.e. the golden rule.) People only need to be reminded that a moral code exisst to be reminded to pause for thought occasionally.

If a code's existence is more important than its content and if there’s an evolutionary aspect to the 10 commandments, as it transits various languages and cultures, then you would expect its content to become increasingly obscure, distorted, and bizarre over the millennia. So any genuine improvement would involve making it ‘worse’, from a scientific/engineering perspective. Things like lofty and archaic sounding words, impenetrable phrases, sentence length, character spacing, and font would be the most important aspects. The original commandments were probably even more effective back when hardly anyone could read and printing and possession of bibles was banned. The actual content of the commandments being completely irrelevant to illiterate people. To make the commandments equally effective today then they need to become so obscure and meaningless that people won't scoff at them.

@Schrodinger's Cat

Comment 8 by Schrodinger's Cat

When's the last time any megalomaniac dictator, terrorist group, or religious fundamentalists bothered to argue their cause with anyone ? They would all see arguing as a weakness...not a strength.

Religious people and terrorists usually attempt to spread their doctrines and dictators are always attempting to justify themselves. Gaddaffi frequently claimed to be the world's only true democratic government. And all dictators take extreme measures to stuff ballot boxes, kill and torture opponents with credible arguments countering their propaganda justifications, while cultivating ‘free’ elections, even when all contesting political parties are illegal.

I think there’s another possibility explaining why an instinct for verbal argument might have developed. Aside from it just being an improvement on non-verbal reasoning and communication via sophisticated language – which might be enough to generate selection pressure in difficult situations.

A verbal argument necessarily imposes a world view, independently of the content of the argument, and this view may have been an important influence on the evolution of human society. Specific aspects of the other party’s point of view are inherent to any argument. Like the tacit recognition of the other party’s ability to receive the message and therefore (in theory) to participate in the argument – which occurs inherently without depending on any response or 2-way dialogue. By their mere participation each party in an argument acknowledges the other’s entitlement to the use of their own material self: their brain and body and all the accumulated resources, including sufficient time, space, information, energy, and physical substance that established, comprise, and maintain that body.

This is essentially the basis of ownership and property rights, and precedence in ownership entitlement. (i.e. ownership is established by whoever first incorporates those otherwise commonly accessed, but scarce, environmental resources into their life.) Engaging in argument implies acknowledgement of the other party’s unchallenged possession of sufficient resources to exist and engage in reasoned argument, and possession of all other ‘property’ and rights that logically depends on this – even if the subject of the content of the verbal argument involves a world view which attempts to negate rights to life and property ownership of the other party.

As a trait that might be naturally selected for in human evolution then the more often that verbal argument occurs then the more often are the parties reminded that each other is human and available for intelligent cooperation, rather than being considered as just part of the environment, potentially being a consumable resource open to ownership, possession, and exploitation by others. So it’s possible that a uniform language and accents have evolved to facilitate arguments as means of generating mutual respect and social bonding to enable very large communities via a common language. This goes beyond the simple exchange of important information – which might be a capability that exists because verbal argument exists.

I think there’s a natural maximum size of primate tribes which humans obviously routinely exceed, presumably owing to having developed complex language rather than outright intelligence. (If we relied just on intelligence and unreliably varying degrees of empathy then some of us might easily decide that other people are more useful as a meal than as a colleague.)

It’s also possible that divergence and diversity of language and accents has evolved to facilitate warfare and exploitation of competing tribes by impeding the frequency of verbal argument.

This the tenuous link. Banking and magic are more or less the same thing.

About being off topic. Everything involves politics at some point. Especially religion. It religion were not politically significant it would just be a sad delusion causing limited damage. So politics is never be off topic. The real problem is long rambling posts ...

I think that magic is entertaining because we are emotionally anxious we are being deceived. Like knowing true love or whether we are even awake and not dreaming and in part of the matrix. Some religious people have to try hard to retain certainty about their religious beliefs. Sometime they get tired and are perhaps not fully convinced that they are inherently evil sinners. Plus there’ the nagging question about why are they the only person who hasn’t yet spoken in tongues or who God doesn’t seem to bother answering prayers? At least with a magic show we can be momentarily secure in the complete confidence that we really are being overtly deceived. It gives us a chance to relax for a bit.

Covert deception is all about competition versus cooperation, but most people have it politically back to front. Socialism is the aggressively competitive ‘them versus us’ tribal attitude. Capitalism is the globally inclusive cooperative approach, when the other party is unknown or unaffiliated to one’s tribe. The tenuous connection is that bank money is the magical basis of deception, while also being the only basis of cooperation beyond the immediate tribe.

There’s interesting ideas in the work of any intelligent and informed person and entertainers like Penn & Teller and the various Marxs are no exception. But the interest is where their ideas may be wrong and why so many people might think they’re right, despite the evidence. Marx is the more notable example. Marx was the last of the school of classical economists. You need to follow these key ideas of the different schools to understand economics because the ideas which are wrong, yet persist anyway – like religious doctrine, are often more important than the ideas which are scientifically valid. It’s the same with jazz music. The notes the musicians now don’t play when improvising are as important as what they do play. But you need to work your way up from 100 years of history via African drumming, ragtime, stride piano, blues, and harmony theory to make sense of it all.

Like magicians who understand how the tricks work it may be difficult to remain economically spiritual after absorbing various theories about human nature and implied constraints on human action (and particularly why some ideas remain so sticky and politically relevant). There’s a difference between a science-based comprehension of reality that informs people to promote cooperation and long term overall benefits versus aggressively manipulating perceptions to deceive other people, either for their own good (defined by elite opinion) or to exploit short term benefits of the privileged.

Mechanisms of deception, via banking, are the basis of macroeconomics and the creation of fiat money and credit. Fiat money, and the entire banking system, are socialist institutions which persist because they’re so effective to centrally plan and coordinate large populations. They work by deceiving people that there are more resources and capabilities available than really exist. People then act to undertake unaffordable and risky projects they otherwise would not willingly consider. This goes beyond stats like housing starts and consumer spending to include things more open to political engineering like the impending ‘limited’ nuclear war in Iran or allowing the Greeks and Italians to party on at the expense of most German citizens.

What you’re left with, after 100 years of it, is that socialism has evolved to be less malignant because it works more subtly via fraud instead of overt force, via the political elite in all countries. It’s well-disguised from our natural political immune systems because even many of the elite believe themselves to be capitalists because they have earned their wealth and high status via what they claim is the free market.

It doesn’t seem plausible that anyone might become a good person (i.e. intrinsically motivated towards good will to other people instead of acting in fear of supernatural punishment) just because they’ve stumbled across how easily people can be manipulated by party tricks. Some magicians also become expert scam artists, including in the religion industries. Just as some economic scientists become cynical players in local, national, and global politics. I suspect that Keynes did this, plus the current mob in USA and ECB. Marx possibly too. Magicians have the luxury of being entertainers, so they have less to lose and can safely challenge the power elites. When cornered they can always claim they were only joking – a bit like John Lennon being bigger than Jesus. The real players don’t react well when their secret tricks are exposed – just ask Julian Assange. Even the minor players like Uri Geller occasionally invest in aggressive litigation to protect their interests.

Libertarianism doesn’t seem to be a very useful label now.

The word was coined to be distinguishable from liberalism because all traditionally ‘liberal’ political parties adopted socialist policies as their core platforms owing to the obviously ‘true’ ideas of Marx about the inherent instability of capitalism and the idea of historical progress. Scientific socialism became the dominant belief following the obviously apparent success of government projects in the early 20th century. So the word liberal lost its meaning.

The substance behind libertarianism is negative, like atheism, in that it isn’t a form of socialism. It is just the absence of an unjustifiable belief in the supernatural magic of a higher economic authority. Socialism being magical thinking because the belief in the goodness of socialism is correlation based on what is obvious rather than the underlying reality. Correlation without causation – the alternative projects displaced (the control experiments – which indicate causation) did not occur. The costs and benefits of the otherwise displaced alternative projects would have been dispersed and therefore impractical to measure – all management processes depending on what can be conveniently measured. They also would otherwise have been subjectively valued and undertaken at the voluntary discretion of those immediately affected instead of being coercively administered and evaluated by the politically established criteria of appointed experts via central planning.

Information constraints mean that these projects cannot have succeeded except by changing the basis of estimating ‘success’ by eliminating the possibility of comparison situations. i.e. it is the appearance of science but without controls. In practise the effects over 100 years have been obvious.

Another perspective on this is the evolution of human institutions via selection. Policies and practises that were selected in versus those selected out over time. Eventually socialist policies came to dominate politics because politics is virtually irrelevant without the power associated with centralisation. This is artificial selection compared to natural selection, over a very short timeframe of only a few generations. Eventually there is a wide gulf between the way institutions operate and the reality of what’s happening in the community. At which point someone like Marx would have expected some historically significant turmoil. Except that Marx’s ideas have been debunked – so there isn’t that much around in the way of ideology for the disaffected to fall back on.

So you get people calling themselves libertarians for all kinds of reasons. About the only thing many of them have in common is opposition to the inherent information theory constraints of centrally planned coercive economic policy in the interests of the privileged elite. But many people considered to be libertarians aren’t that interested in the technical details such as why communism is ridiculous and must inevitably fail. People can be opposed to the concept of socialism (which is essentially that application of family and tribal political mechanisms to vast populations) for other interesting reasons such as that coercive central planning is really the family, community, church, or god’s responsibility and that those advocating it are usurping god’s prerogative etc. Perhaps that’s why there remains some passionate political interest in religion in many places.

I think it was a famous libertarian (from the days when the word meant something) Murray Rothbard, who said that political change only happens via positive ideas to do something – meaning political power to get people to do stuff. Nothing much changes because people are merely opposed to whatever is already there. E.g. You won’t see hordes of people out manning the barricades in defence of lower transaction costs. They need an ideology to believe in - as opposed to a theory to verify and understand reality.

Theoretical (as opposed to ideology) libertarianism doesn’t need to be laissez faire. It’s more about how the regulating institutions arise and operate, naturally versus ideology. The leading ‘libertarian’ theory being that these social institution processes currently based on majority vote democracies is a recipe for disaster and that relatively liberal communities are decivilising as a result and are barely remaining barely intact while running down the institutional capital established in a pre-democratic era. A little like the early success of communism based on preceding institutions and the coerced savings of the population – which resulted in impoverishment of the masses and enrichment of the privileged elite. Whenever you see this rapidly diverging effect then it’s a clue as to what’s going on in that community.

@aquilicane

Organisations often cannot act in others' or even their own best interests if their short term interests are compromised as a result. There is a path dependency / game theory situation that constrains their possibilities.

The entire industry of tobacco product manufacturers and marketers could have a massive impact on the incidence of lung cancer if they simply ceased to produce their weight control and stress management remedies. But this will never happen, if only because governments prefer the short term tax revenues over the very long term social medical cost benefits. Things get complex when alternative nicotine delivery technology is effectively banned by govt (in response to industry lobbying). The evidence about the health risks of smoking is only relevant to the extent the very few marketers of tobacco products are now smokers and that there is now much more fine print and fewer positive health claims made for the benefits of smoking in their sales contracts.

The concept of opportunity cost is closely related to evolution by natural selection - which is something that was referred to in the Darwin the economist thread some time back. The point is that things which did not happen, choices not taken, events that were displaced by mutually exclusive alternatives, etc. really do leave no evidence trail. People will tend to pay for what they perceive is a relevant association. As in superstition, homeopathic remedies etc. because they get better when they take the pill. The same thing applies when people take a preventative remedy: that they remain healthy is taken as evidence that the remedy must work and is worth paying for. But the quack remedy that appears to cure an existing condition will always be more highly valued than a quack remedy which merely appears to prevent a problem. This industry works very effectively only because the cost of quack drug development is negligible, which means that any ROI is a good ROI. But real pharmaceuticals incur very real costs of development and there is a much greater incentive to overlook inconvenient data. It doesn't have to be highly unethical or some kind of determined conspiracy. As Ben Goldacre pointed out (in another rdnet item some time back) there is evidence of a lot of missing data in pharmaceutical research, which biases impresssions in convenient directions.

Sometimes a statistical aberration indicating the lack of otherwise expected variation in evidence is a form of evidence itself. As in Ben Goldacre's TED example where the absence of evidence really is evidence of absence

I second that on Derren Brown’s contribution.

The important target to address are kids and Derren Brown seems to capture the interest of kids, with their parent’s approval. Penn & Teller were very good, and the kids love it, but the Bullshit series emphasises dirty language rather than dirty deeds. So some parents would be cautious about exposing their kids to such despicable characters.

Re Penn Jillettes’s libertarianism:

From what I can tell some of the most interesting pop science writers seem to embrace libertarianism. E.g. Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley.

Libertarianism is not an economic system or a political ideology of convenient personal preference. There is some real substance behind it. i.e. it is not just a matter of inherited belief, random preference, or contrarian attitude. It has something in common with atheism in that it is merely an absence of crucial and widely accepted, yet non-existent and impossible, concept. It isn’t a good label to define the substance of more extended theories. There is no copyright or trademark. People who call themselves libertarian do not necessarily possess a common set of peculiar beliefs any more that many atheists may possibly posses a common belirf in idiotic economic or political concepts based on flawed assumptions originating outside their area of interest.

@dloubet

There was an article in Australian media the other day about how so few patients are complying with medical prescription instructions. The main product affected was the cholesterol lowering drugs, which may be the drug category most heavily promoted by industry sales reps. This category replaced the ulcer medications which were a major money spinner but was undermined by the helicobacter pylori discovery. So the discovery did have an impact - though it took years to take effect. (Fortunately sales of spicy food have remained unaffected.)

But the impact is overall negative on customers because so many people are now taking cholesterol and blood pressure lowering medication - as a replacement income source for the displaced fake ulcer remedies. I think there has been some research casting doubt about the usefulness of the cholesterol lowering drugs. Not so much showing that the drugs don't work, but identifying that there's little worthwhile evidence that addressing the symptoms (arbitrarily 'high' cholesterol ratios) has any relevance to addressing the causes of heart disease.

@Vicktor

I think it's safe to assume that if your waistline is difficult to identify then no one will be studying it very closely. If you think that your waistline is in any way a problem then you may be at risk of Alzheimers, assuming you don't get whacked by something else before then. You can control for the amount of energy you eat and expend which will ensure you remain lean looking. But that's not the same thing as actually being healthy. It's possible to be fat and healthy.

Apparently it depends on how you acquire your body fat. If it's from eating mostly fat (real fat that is) then it's less of a problem than the chronic glucose exposure from eating mostly carbohydrate food sources. This is a ray of hope for normal people. There will be some people who appear to be super fit, ripped, and who work out at the gym for 5 hours a day high on testosterone and steroids and who eat low fat, high protein diets, with lots of sports drinks thrown in. The chances are high that these guys will all die of alzheimers fairly soon.

There's something you can do about it now. Read up on glycation.

But I expect this new research will probably sink without a trace. It usually takes much more than an initial dose of scientific reality to kill off a dominant theory. Especially one that became dominant despite not explaining the data for so long. The last thing anyone whose career is based on the prevailing paradigm really needs is actual disconfirming evidence. It’s like religion: the more obviously incredible it begins to seem and the more believers are faced with disconfirming evidence then the more reactionary and intense their belief.

Perhaps the real cause of the Alzheimers epidemic is exactly what the professor says: that pharmaceutical suppliers (effectively the direct or indirect source of research funding) are mainly interested in establishing saleable products which work by disrupting metabolic pathways to treat the condition. The focus is on finding target pathways for potential treatment products. For this purpose an understanding of the causal process need not extend beyond identifying a statistically significant association with a suitable disruption target.

A cure is financially inappropriate because if the condition were to disappear then also disappearing would be future ROI from treatment products. It’s hard to get paid for preventing something because there’s less obvious evidence that what was prevented would otherwise have occurred. And it wouldn’t make sense for a pharmaceutical firm to develop yet another pathway disrupting drug when the problem is caused by a pathway already being disrupted. They'd have to develop a disruptor for the disruptor. Which would be like swallowing a spider to catch the fly.

So how did this inconvenient research slip through the net? They may struggle to attract further funding. Especially given that it may result in the sudden and premature death of an entire family of potentially profitable products.

I’m betting that Alzheimers will eventually prove to be yet another glycation effect, with genetic bad luck governing any individual’s relative intolerance to chronic glycation leading to either alzheimers, cancer, heart disease, failing eyesight, strokes, or diabetes and overweight. There is possibly no pharmaceutical treatment for glycation. Only prevention strategies. i.e. no money in it. So you don't hear about it much.

A positive implication of the glycation theory is that alzheimer victims might be the lucky ones. It typically occurs late in life which implies that the victim has successfully avoided and earlier death from cancer, heart disease, of diabetes from which would otherwise have been at high risk. If the glycation theory turns out to be true then these preceding diseases may all have this same root cause but their earlier impact may ‘protect’ against alzheimers by preventing victims from living long enough for alzheimers to become apparent.

Here's a useful example of how to exploit the peer review process for fun and profit:

http://xkcd.com/955/

You don’t have to just shoot fish in a barrel. You could also take the money and run with it, if they are seriously committed to this hypothesis.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity to help out with practical experiments, once the Imam’s research funding cheque clears? Experiments might be relatively cheap and the Imam might even be eligible for a dual Nobel Prize in Physics and Moral Depravity if the theory is supported by experiment.

For ethical considerations the testing could happen in Australia where so much city infrastructure is already burnt, flooded, or otherwise dilapidated owing to decades of socialist maladministration. Atheists could also be employed as subjects, because they’ve already forfeited their heaven options. Using atheists should also keep costs down owing to their lack of moral compass and consequential enthusiasm for immodest dress and adultery.

I’m not sure how to control for Australian moral depravity having different effects on god, by diverting god’s southern hemisphere wrath towards fires, floods, and socialism rather than earthquakes.

@Comment 6 by Tyrosine

Comment 6 by Tyrosine

Laissez-faire free market capitalism is the closest thing, outside of the natural world, to natural selection.

Quit right. The banks have already failed. They failed a long time ago. Maintaining the pretense that this hasn’t really happened only prolongs and intensifies the destruction.

But artificial selection has a role to play as well. If our early agricultural ancestors had instead developed the practise of ‘bailing out’ the dairy cows that tended to produce the least reliable milk supply then I don’t think I’d be enjoying milk with my coffee just now. But it takes some time for idiocy to be selected out of contention. Even longer when those who are doing the artificial selection are idiots.

The Laissez Faire concept is only ‘natural’ in the sense that the market mechanisms are too inherently complex and chaotic for any person to effectively intervene to positive effect. i.e. Markets are beyond the capability of individual or concentrated human intelligence to control. The relevant information is inherently distributed and too dynamic to be centrally managed via some kind of social central nervous system. Human societies are colonies, like a jellyfish, rather than integrated multi-cellular individual organisms with a single brain. Markets are the emergent appearance of cooperative activity which is driven by aggregate human behaviour to realise positive benefits, on which selection occurs. But if enough people have personal defects in their own central nervous system to believe otherwise then they will certainly try to achieve the impossible – eventually with obvious results.

There’s lots of opinion and information around about specific intricacies of the various forms of evil practises in the financial sector. But If you really want to understand the relatively simple mechanism by which the banking system has failed read De Soto’s amazing history of Banking:

http://mises.org/resources/2745/Money-Bank-Credit-and-Economic-Cycles

It’s a large book, covering thousands of years of banking history, but non-technical – presumably so that even bankers or economists could understand it. Given what’s happening now I think it would be well worthwhile making the effort to comprehend it, rather than depending on the self-interested pronouncements of the prominent ‘experts’. I think it is one of the most important books published in recent years.

What is happening now is not at all unusual in the history of civilisation. Which means it has very little to do with innovations in financial engineering or nuances of economic theory since the time of Adam Smith.

@Comment 9 by Ivan The Not So Bad

Comment 9 by Ivan The Not So Bad

I'm not suggesting that we hang the guilty from lampposts

In a real market economy consumer preferences would prevail. I’m very much in favour of a real market economy.

This article is mostly a load of bullshit. The author should probably take a course in basic economics, but as a student and not as a professor.

There is ‘a’ reason why most economists regard Adam Smith as the founder of economics, but it’s not a good reason – because Smith obviously wasn’t the founder or economics. Neither was Darwin. Professors can honour anyone they like but that doesn’t change history.

The concept of developing complexity via variation and selection is fundamental to everything that involves information processing, which is why this concept pops up in so many different fields. It happened to become significant in economics owing to insights about opportunity costs (that what isn’t seen – the options that were eliminated and didn’t occur), not just because of early theories about population dynamics attributed to Malthus and others who were directly or indirectly associated with Darwin.

Some popular and well-entrenched economic misconceptions are bundled into this article:

• The idea of invisible hand theory of the market is not an explanation. There never was such a theory. Smith’s explanation was that this was an illusion, not an explanation of the beneficial side effect of market processes. Or even that the benefits of markets are some kind of unintended side effect. • Markets and competition do not have the same meaning in economics and in biology. Markets are a tool of communication to enable cooperation involving the allocation of scarce resources, not a form of communication involving aggressive threats, deterrents, and conflict over scarce resources. Markets only work by agreement. The opposite of markets only works by coercion against individual self-interests. Aggressive competition in markets what really means that market participants attempt to outperform other participants and to offer the most attractive alternative. This works in both directions (trade and division of labour are exchanges of value, not a unidirectional supply). Aggression in commerce also has a different meaning to the same term used by biologists. Markets are not mechanisms for participants to coerce competitors and customers to constrain options to ensure that their own offer is least unattractive. (This was Smith’s more relevant contribution, the game theory concept that at least some participants tend to seek to conspire to exploit political power to impede trade and division of labour for short term advantage at the expense of the rest.) • Long term self- interest is not the same thing as pathological greed. • There is no such thing as a common good. Such a ‘good’ must always be defined from the perspective of someone’s theory about what the common good should be, rather than what personal preferences and acceptable compromises actually are. The socialist theory that some privileged elites know and can implement other people’s preferences better than those other people know their own interests is still a relatively very young theory, which is unlikely to survive much longer before being naturally selected out of contention. • There is also no such concept of ‘socially productive’. These terms could more simply be replaced by the word ‘good’ – as in whatever God is believed to want is deemed to be good. And in the absence of a conveniently available god's point of reference then what is good is deemed to be whatever the privliged person wants who claims to be speaking on behalf of god, or some equivalent form of wisdom (perhaps a long dead economist?) regarded as equally credible. This frame of reference, ‘socially’ or ‘collectively’ or whatever, is really just an abstract statistic which lacks qualities that make being ‘good’ meaningful. I think this may have been what Margaret Thatcher meant years ago with her famous comments that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Obviously there is such a thing as a society, but the idea that it can have measurable preferences that are separable from individual preferences is meaningless. • It is not possible steal someone’s thoughts, ideas, innovation, job, customer, or sales. There can be no property rights assigned to control another person’s preferences. (Obviously people can change their minds and make and break promises – but that’s not the same thing as stealing. Perhaps excepting where slavery is effectively legal. But to concede any of these concepts as amenable to theft implies the concept of assigning people as property rights.) • Group interests cannot trump individual interests because there is no mechanism for selection pressure to produce this effect. Humans are not hive animals, despite appearances. We have just evolved great tolerance and communication which enables many of us (about 50% recent estimates) to live in hives - for the purpose of enhancing options for division of labour and gains from exchange and mutual cooperation. But these benefits are from the frame of the individual, not the group. • Many male humans actually do possess antlers and fight over females. But they’re known as prestige cars and they weigh considerably more than 40lbs and are wider than 4 foot. They also contribute to environmental destruction which is costly to the overall group. Prestige cars are a form of religion in some counties, particularly in primitive societies like Australia with aggressive road rage typically arising from perceived challenges over relative status and conflict about precedence and deferral based on the make and model. The production of these cars is a kind of arms race and high status human males have evolved the practise of shedding these antlers every season or two, in order to ensure their ongoing attractiveness. (They also tend to shed their accumulation of females from time to time.) • The modern conservative's case for minimal government does not rest on the presumption that competition always promotes society's welfare any more the modern squanderer’s case for maximal government rests on the presumption that the disruption of market information flow to impede cooperation by division of labour and to restrict choices always promotes the interests of the rich and powerful plutocrats.

@Comment 19 by Vicktor

Regarding seeking a cure for cancer and Nobel prizes. I'm just reading about his now.

From what I’ve just read there may actually be no cure for cancer. But what’s been discovered instead is the means of avoiding most cancers in the first place. Cancer is the result of the body not preventing tumours. Which obviates a cure for most cancers, except for relatively rare genetic defects, toxic carcinogens, radiation, and virus-related infections causing cancer. The relevant Nobel prizes in biochemistry have already been awarded but the crucial research implications are in isolated fields and there isn’t a general appreciation of its significance.

There’s a fundamental issue with medical practise and pharmaceutical supply which requires a disease to become apparent and then be treated. The established system can’t address prevention, because the money links with supplying treatment, and research funding is linked with the supply of money. The problem for most people is that the means of avoiding cancer contradicts expert consensus nutritional recommendations. This also means that proposed experiments, even assuming that funding might be available, would likely fail ethical hurdles because what is now believed by a minority of researchers to be a means of avoiding cancer is also believed by the majority (wrongly I think, with no basis in actual research evidence – as discovered by the Cochrane group) to be the actual cause of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. There’s an element of conspiracy, but it isn’t being kept quiet. Though it’s expected to take another 30 years before government and industry institution research funding gets back on track. (Which is virtually all of the significant research – particularly the large and long term trials required.)

I mention this because I’m in the midst of re-reading Gary Taube’s book on nutrition. It is full of interesting examples of bad science – over 50 years of it leading to the peculiar situation of unjustified assumptions about nutrition and disease becoming entrenched doctrine in the medical profession and public health institutions. It’s very similar to the bizarre situation now have in macroeconomics, and apparently may even have the same underlying cause: Essentially the loss of life and destruction of professional scientific careers in Germany and Austria around the time of WW1, the depression and hyperinflation, WW2, and the holocaust. This created a vacuum of established expertise in specific fields and no one bothered to read the preceding accumulated knowledge, which remained untranslated until recently. Peer review failed because there were no peers. First across the line, winner take all.

@Comment 18 by mmurray

If I remember correctly there was found to be a statistical bias towards lower order surnames in tenured US academic staff compared to the general population. I’m not sure if they measured the frequency of citations or whether that was just speculation on the causal mechanism.

Other explanations may have been offered: like people with surnames beginning with the letter A being significantly more likely to be awarded an “A” for assessments when they were students and causing those people to be more inclined towards academic careers.Just one of those things that happens, like people named Dennis becoming Dentists more frequently than expected by random chance. Perhaps there is also a confidence/leadership effect with people of lower letter order surnames being featured more prominently in everything. Which means they might tend to get more opportunities to develop as youths. If there is less than enough of something worth having then a seeming ‘fair’ approach to awarding these experiences is to allocate resources and opportunities in alphabetical order. The outcome being a bit like birth order where older siblings tend to be advantaged in many large families. People with a low birth order and a low alphabet order surname should be even more advantaged.

Possibly this work also wasn’t peer reviewed. Being deemed to be too amusing to risk being eliminated from publication owing to its merely not being true.

On the skeptical side:

“A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions.”

Cohen, M. N. (1989). Health and the Rise of Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press.

I’m not involved in science and know little about the varieties of peer review process. But it seems to be a reasonable assumption that such a process cannot be independent of the individuals and institutions involved. So you'd expect variable results, depending on the financial interests involved. (Results being very variable and heavily biased in fields like economics and industrial production - agriculture, energy, military, and pharmaceuticals etc.)

The scientific attitude is essentially to be acutely and unnaturally alert for errors and biases, and the peer review process is no different to any other aspect of scientific processes that may be subject to errors and biases. Presumably reviewing research is a skill like playing guitar – enhancing that skill and improving performance never ceases. Players are perpetual students of the instrument, of which some are very much better than others but all regard themselves as students. So peer review would be an art rather than a science. You’d expect a reasonable amount of artistic results along with worthwhile science.

If a scientist’s fundamental professional responsibility is to be an expert at bias mitigation then a good understanding of the psychology of cognitive biases would be a prerequisite for a career as a professional scientist. I suspect that this isn’t the case. Which means more art and less science. In contrast, most professional accountants spend the bulk of their time involved in processes which exist purely to minimise errors, ensuring data matches reality, and mitigating inevitable fraud. The more sophisticated work of accountants, where real commercial progress is made: optimising business processes, mitigating operational risks, capital allocation and exploiting commercial opportunities, takes second place because this work cannot be effective based on flawed data. Accountants have a professional society for the purpose of establishing standards in these processes, especially audit (technical equivalent of aspects of peer review).

And from the economics perspective: what doesn’t come up for peer review can be as relevant as what is peer reviewed. There’s examples of publication bias where results that contradict prevailing assumptions (on which government funding agencies pin expectations and which therefore impact on future funding) often fail to surface – as pointed out by Ben Goldacre in the recent blog post on rdnet about his TED presentation about 'missing' pharmaceutical research. Plus there’s the phenomenon of academic tenure being awarded to researchers with the most prominent and easily identifiable professional contribution. I.e. peer reviewed publications and the volume of citations. (I’ve heard there are informal clubs of scientists who reciprocally cite each other’s work – maybe it’s a game they’re compelled to play in order to secure an income.) There’s a possibility for this process to be manipulated and the evidence exists in the statistics, similar to the evidence that identified the presence of betting fraud among sumo wrestlers in Japan. (It’s the non-randomness and the dog that didn’t bark in the night phenomena.)

An interesting effect is the bias which implies that some aspiring scientists should consider changing their names to better assure professional success (owing to the practise of abbreviating citations in the list of research team paper authors by alphabetical order and to the first or first 2 names – having a low order alphabet name enhances hit’s on citation volume). On that basis, in this era of electronic databases, then new work at a junior level by likes of Isaac Zewton, Charles Zarwin, or Richard Zawkins would be less likely to lead to appointments enabling circumstances favourable to potential professional success.

Another aspect is salesmanship. People don’t ‘buy’ anything without acquiring a sense of ownership. In the case of anonymous reviews that 'buy in' might involve feedback and evidence of that feedback modifying the output. Many academic scientists are also teachers, or at least have been in school for way too long, enough time that they may regard being a teacher as somehow normal. Which implies that aspiring researchers should offer subtle but crucial flaws for peer review, allowing reviewers to make an emotionally satisfying contribution to the process. Again, this may be a game that needs to be played just to get into the real game.

I got very interested in this computer games stuff years ago because my kids were born around the same time as on-line games. My oldest had an alarming photosensitive epilepsy experience around the age of 4 – playing Age of Empires I think. Probably less of a problem now with LED instead of CRT monitors.

The article mentions these claims going back a long way. From what I discovered they go back as far as the dawn of civilisation.

There is evidence of reactionary criticism by expert authorities against every innovation adopted by younger generations. Recent claims about the evils of computer games and social networking are a 5,000 year tradition of accumulating complaints about the brain damaging effects of whatever happens to be the prevailing pop culture innovation of the era. Examples: computer games, pinball, pool, rock music, sock hops, television, movies, jazz, radio, comics, novels, opera, ballet, newspapers, playing cards, printed bibles, poetry, dice, chess, and theatre in ancient Greece. Each was subjected to scientific arguments lobbying for preventative legislation. Probably there were prehistoric attempts to supress harps, nose flutes, tattoos, body and cave painting dancing, drums. Even the invention of fire would have been opposed by expert authorities. I can imagine tribal elders agonising about the social networking implications of youths sitting around camp fires in the evenings.

You would expect some correlation of teenage brain changes correlated with internet use. But there are too many confounding variables and other explanations. How could epidemiologists find a reliable control group of comparable teenagers who don’t use the internet and aren't liars? And the few honest kids who claim to use the internet least are likely to be much more physically active. Which means they aren’t a control because they behave so differently. Teenagers also experience natural brain changes plus many teenagers eat and drink huge quantities of sugar and are sedentary. Brain changes which eventually result in dementia are a known consequence of glycation via chronic exposure to dietary glucose. And chronic toxic glucose exposure is compounded without energy burning exercise.

Some teenage kids are obese and physically inactive and therefore more likely to play computer games. But anti-obesity recommendations may increase their intake of glucose-based foods as a preferred lower energy density alternative to displace higher energy density fats (but fats are what the growing brain is made of). So you’d expect abnormal brain development to be correlated with computer games anyway, if only because all kids play computer games but only the fat kids don’t do much of anything else and are encouraged to consume low fat diets.

Another confounding aspect is that computer games probably have a positive effect on brains. So net negative effects of computer gaming would mostly be a result of computer users being sedentary plus gaming displacing otherwise normal teenage physical activity. You could just as easily blame teenage brain damage on school homework.

Here’s an example about how computer games could one day be linked to physical activity to eliminate the sedentary aspects of gaming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3_H4QnZXe4

It's a pretty good argument in favour of evolution. Nails probably enhance the sense of touch and pressure sensitivity of the pads of the fingers and toes. It makes sense that selection pressure would also favour retaining toe nails because when running over rough terrain at high speed in bare feet then every form of sensory input available becomes important. Especially an accurate sensation of the slipperiness and firmness of the ground.

Here's an interesting presentation on how this affects running:

The evolutionary advantages of toes (and presumably toenails) becomes more obvious when you look at how our ancestors spent most of their time obtaining food.

It's one of the reasons why barefoot running is becoming more popular: better shock absorption (means more time training with less risk of injury) and better sensitivity and response to terrain (means less stumbling and therefore less risk of injury). Generally the concept of less risk of injury would have been very much more important for our prehistoric ancestors. Injuries for our ancestors would have been more serious than just a visit to outpatients clinics and skipping a few weeks training or missing the next race. It's a trade off in the kind of injury. Running around barefoot means a broken toe or toenail is more likely than if wearing shoes. But this might be far less debilitating than suffering a fall or accumulating knee or hip degeneration or stress fractures, which is inevitable if wearing shoes, especially shock absorbing trainers.

http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_to_run.html

@Comment 41 by Nunbeliever

Yes, torture might be a byproduct. Inherited traits often come in bundles and it’s the net effect of the bundle that counts. Generally the bundle won’t endure unless some parts of it are critical to survival, or it the non-beneficial aspects are at least reasonably harmless for reproduction.

The emotional side is just part of the reward system that drives immediate human behaviour. Subsequent regret and loss of self esteem is another aspect that moderates future behaviour. Logical reasoning would also be relevant sometimes. But reasoning doesn’t have to be correct to drive behaviour – it only needs to seem plausible and to create relevant expectations.

You don’t need to explain why people enjoy eating certain kinds of foods. The details might be interesting and useful to identify and understand, and I'd like to understand them myself, but you can be reasonably confident that extraordinarily complex and redundant mechanisms have evolved to facilitate feeding. Whether or not the details are yet well understood by anyone. In recent human history rational logic, in the form of modern pseudoscience, has played a significant role in driving eating behaviour – hence the rise of vegetarianism, saturated fat and cholesterol aversion etc. in the mid 20th century. Which might be an example of plausible reasoning, but which turned out to be wrong and harmful.

Complex emotional and hormonal mechanisms naturally arise via natural selection. Feeding provides an obvious benefit and natural selection over deep time takes care of all the complex details. There are less obvious, yet still tangible, benefits from various other behaviour, including bullying and torture. And the mechanisms which trigger this behaviour are likely to be even more complex and subtle than for feeding – which is an active area of research with some interesting new discoveries.

From what I’ve read these are the tangible benefits derived from torture:

1. The pleasure and excitement experienced by the dysfunctional – similarly for compulsive shoplifters, taggers, vandals, and arsonists. (Which I don’t think is relevant – as you say: most Nazi concentration camp guards were relatively normal and sane.)
2. Extraction of useful actionable information during legal procedures. As in Guantanamo Bay – but experts are divided on whether it is reliable. Like lie detection. It’s probably more relevant during legal processes for inducing compliance and confessions in show trials.
3. Making a public example of people – not just by punishing the innocent as a deterrent (i.e. by getting people to imagine how much worse it would be for someone who was actually guilty), but for internal political purposes to demonstrate one’s willingness to do something about something. (Which may also apply to Guantanamo Bay.)
4. Intimidating or provoking enemies as a deterrence or, perhaps more likely, to encourage reckless attacks which might expose enemies to retaliation. (Again also useful for internal political purposes as much as for more overt strategies – because enabling evidence of active enemy threats is a politically important tactic to unify and consolidate otherwise marginal political support.)
5. To trigger the Pavlov response. i.e. emotional reversal that favours the torturer. Popularly known as battered wife syndrome. This aspect I think is more significant and might exist owing to selection effects over the course of human evolution. I think that similar behaviour has been observed in chimps.

If there’s a tangible net benefit, which might be obtainable by minor behavioural changes in specific triggering circumstances, then chances are reasonable that the capability to incur and exploit such available benefits will naturally evolve. You can assume that if the consequential behaviour is detected, and if there is a potentially selectable benefit that follows, then the detailed mechanisms will be in there somewhere awaiting discovery.

From an economics perspective torture is an action which requires the expenditure of energy and/or the incurring of otherwise avoidable risk: e.g. retaliation,or inadequate benefits to compensate for the associated resource expenditure (time and effort). Emotional pleasure is the mechanism that drives behaviour to conform with what is most likely to be good for us. Even arsonists and serial killers make economic trade-offs regarding their criminal activities - as shown by the mapping systems that show they tend to stick within a travel time/cost budget centering on their home locations.

So there’s little to explain about why some people enjoy inflicting torture. As long as there’s a benefit which is amenable to natural selectionvia reproduction then you’d expect people would be emotionally driven to inflict torture in situations where this response is triggered. As with most emotional responses, it’s possible that it might be triggered inappropriately in dysfunctional people. But they would be the exceptions. It might be misleading to focus on the exceptions.

I think the psychologists, e.g. Milgram and Zimbardo, have conclusively established that most of us will exhibit the appropriate response in specific situations. We are all capable of torture, though not many of us would actually enjoy it. But the capability for inflicting torture (or cruelty and bullying - which are the same thing really) would be naturally selected for, even if very few people are driven to torture behaviour and other cruelty, as long as there is an economic advantage – presumably associated with direct reproduction. i.e. torture oriented towards changing or augmenting tribal affiliation in child-bearing women. i.e. wife beating. (Which feature prominently in many religious traditions. Eg. As in the ‘rule of thumb’.) The rest is just a side effect from the natural selection perspective.

I just saw an interview with the Australian physicist on local TV. He made some useful remarks about global warming and political policy.

Interesting to note that he’s also a winemaker. Maybe be a unique marketing angle for Nobel Prize winning vintages. E.g. Contains Dark Energy and carefully aged for optimum consumption in the “not-to-distant future” – by when the universe will become too cold and dark to enjoy wine in moderation.

I've just had half a bottle as my contribution to encouraging scientific progress.

Read Cialdini about hazing rituals. Many organisations couldn’t exist without hazing.

Another theory is that this behaviour results from selection pressure. Human apes generally mate inter-tribally, with females often departing their birth tribe to be adopted by another tribe. Marriage to establish inter-tribal relationships is not the only approach. Most people may be descended from women who were involuntarily absorbed into an enemy tribe after their relatives and children were killed by the adopting tribe.

This occurs via emotional affiliation triggered by extreme abuse – a bit like Pavlov’s dogs. Perhaps similar situations also apply to wolves. The trait of responding by changing tribal affiliation is selected because those who don’t get eaten. (Presumably they are also highly nutritious, and their steaks are pre-tenderised. So it’s a game theory win win from the acquiring tribe’s perspective.) That people occasionally respond by changing long-term affiliation might allow selection for a corresponding trait that triggers abusive behaviour in relevant situations.

In the present context, like Guantanamo Bay, then the affiliation switch rate via such practises could be very low for it to still pay off. There need be no concern about extracting current information – it’s the information that might be extracted from the same person in 30 years time that’s more valuable. So the more innocent and anonymous the victim the more useful it would be to trigger an affiliation switch. Especially so for an intelligence service which was otherwise chronically underfunded, notoriously subject to political interference, and therefore critically lacking in Arabic speaking undercover agents immersed in Islamic culture with family roots in various trouble spots of importance. Even acquiring 1 such person would be a major achievement.

There’s never a problem in finding people who are prepared to undertake the torture. But it couldn’t happen without a substantial institutional benefit that justifies their payroll.

Another explanation for apparently senseless cruelty is the simple logic of powerful, centralised governments: It is difficult to deal with all people one hopes to influence. Machiavelli is full of quotes on the topic. He once advised: To govern effectively the prince should be both loved and feared. But if it comes down to a choice then it is better to be feared. Machiavelli also was under no illusion that government is imperfect and involves crude and imprecise force, which implies inevitable injustices. He advised that if injury is to be done to a man then it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared. So it would pay to create a terrible example with the occasional person one might get hold of in order to emotionally manipulate those who are out of reach (but aren’t confident they’re out of reach). Tax administration is a good example: Governments are critically dependent on involuntary taxation. Most taxation jargon: ‘excise’, ‘ex-tort’, ‘exaction’, is derived from various forms of horrific torture, typically inflicted on children by tax farmers as a means of encouraging parents to comply with otherwise intolerable tax edicts.

Governments may depend on at least the threat of torture. Which might be why death penalties are typically inflicted via some kind of appallingly unnecessary method. Even where the death penalty has been abandoned it could technically be reintroduced overnight in favourable political circumstances. So the threat is ever present in all democratic governments.

Unfortunately I just read this article while eating an entire packet of chocolate biscuits. Fortunately I also had a coffee, which might cancel out some of the effects.

There seems to be accumulating evidence showing up occasionally in the news about the link between diets low in saturated fat and chronic brain disease. Possibly even autism may be linked. Glycation (from high carbohydrate eating) causing tangling and impaired cellular turnover of very large protein molecules is another factor.

The paleo diet advocates have probably got it right and research in future decades might catch up with the concept that what humans evolved to eat prehistorically is the easiest way to remain healthy over a lifetime. Excluding the obvious implications that human flesh might be the optimum food choice, presumably by having exactly the right balance of macro and micro nutrients for optimal fitness. Though even that option may be ruled out because so many of us are chronically ill, owing to poor diet and being ridden with accumulated toxins. Most of us may be unfit for human consumption.

From personal experience, aside from occasionally being ambushed by a lurking packets of chocolate biscuits, I generally eat as little carbohydrates as I can get away with without insulting my wife's cooking. The less carbs and the more animal fat I eat the better I feel. Everything improves: energy, concentration, sleep quality, lack of hunger, fitness, body shape, less aches and pains, and less colds and sniffles. About the only downside is that I get a hangover after drinking only half as much wine.

There’s no need for a land bridge. Boats are more plausible.

A speculative explanation for early migration is the Australian preference for partying and hanging out at the beach. All you need is to assume that prehistoric foragers would be very observant and will take reasonable risks. In the sense that failing to be observant or to take reasonable risks is a habit or trait that would have been naturally selected out of existence.

During a glacial period the visibility between the extra low lying islands would have been very limited. But the effects of thermals in unusually humid weather conditions produces high altitude cloud structures which flag an island’s precise location, even over the visible horizon.

Large bamboo is prolific around Indonesia. And raft technology, using a lattice of thick, light bamboo stems, is not sophisticated. Floating bamboo platforms would have been useful for food gathering, towed around by waders piling on shellfish and crayfish around coastal reefs. When loaded up they could be beached and carried overland by a small group. Upending a raft load after a few hours of foraging at a pristine reef would instantly create a reasonably sized future midden.

People could paddle such a light and bouyant craft several kilometres over the horizon to an untouched reef. Ignoring box jellies and salties, some people can even swim further than this. So interisland hops could have been a day return trip, which means that a doubtful water supply over the horizon might be no deterrent.

A possible driver would be to accumulate surpluses for feasting when tribes congregate and overload regular food sources. Large periodic gatherings are known to occur in traditional Australian and Pacific Island culture. And people will do anything to promote their social status at clan gatherings. Including reckless adventure when gathering party food.

Unusual rainfall might also stimulate exploration with sediment temporarily disturbing coastal foraging near flooding river mouths, stirring up the salties and motivating off shore foraging. (It might be easier to paddle 3 km offshore and back than to move camp or to do the daily commute for food gathering 30 km there and back along the coast.) Unusual rainfall might also produce temporary rainfall reservoirs and springs on tiny, otherwise dry, islands and coral reefs. Which could make explorers inclined towards long-term stays on offshore stepping stone islands.