Category Archives: science

biology, comic, Darwin Eats Cake, evolution, genetics, population genetics, science

Two new characters at Darwin Eats Cake

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So, if you’re a regular reader of Darwin Eats Cake, you’ll already know that two new characters have been introduced to the strip: R A Fisher’s Pipe and J B S Haldane’s Moustache.

If you’re not a regular reader, you should be, because it will make me happy (and it is, after all, the holiday season), and also because Robert Gonzales once called it “my [meaning Robert’s] new favorite webcomic” over at io9.

For those of you who are not population geneticists, or at least evolutionary biologists, Fisher and Haldane are two of the major figures of the “modern synthesis” in evolution in the first part of the twentieth century. This was basically the integration of the Mendelian idea of the gene with the Darwinian idea of gradual change via natural selection. Fisher, in addition, created a whole lot of modern statistics, which have found applications far outside of evolutionary biology.

R. A. Fisher smoking his pipe. Not a euphemism.
J. B. S. Haldane, um, I guess, having his mustache. Note the lack of “o” in the American spelling of mustache.

Fisher loved himself a good smoke. In fact, late in his life, he publicly challenged research purporting to show a causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Oops.

Haldane once chased my former officemate and his mother down the street in a rainstorm in Calcutta to offer them an umbrella.

These two anecdotes provide all the information you need to accurately reconstruct the political views of each.

Fisher passed away in 1962, and Haldane in 1964. Fortunately, one of the most salient features of each was preserved in a jar for posterity. And now, half a century later, the two have reunited to bring you their genetically inspired comedy stylings.

Here’s what you’ve missed so far:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=143
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Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=145
Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/145.png
Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=148
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academia, Ronin Institute, science

Achievement Unlocked: 501c3 Status!

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So, this is reposted from the Ronin Blog:

Greetings to all from the Ronin Institute. We’ve got some good news here. The IRS has officially approved our application for tax-exempt status as a publicly funded 501c3 nonprofit organization!

What does that mean? Well, most importantly, it means that you can now donate to the Ronin Institute to support independent scholarship, and your donation should be tax deductible. Or, as they say on nonprofit websites, “tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law,” which is sort of a funny thing to say. I mean, if you gave a donation to me, personally, it would be “tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law.” It’s just that, in the case of giving money to me, the full extent allowed by law would be zero.

Here, though, your donation is tax deductible in the same way that that donations to the United Way or the Red Cross are. That is, donations to the Ronin Institute should be unambiguously tax deductible, but if there is any question in your mind about your particular circumstances, you should consult with a tax attorney.

So, if you (or your foundation, or your employer) are looking for some things to donate to before the end of the year, here we are! If you believe in reinventing academia, here we are! If you want to help to support some really high quality independent scholarship, here we are! Now hop on over to the Donation page!

If you have questions about the Institute, or would like to direct your donation towards a specific program or project, contact us at development@ronininstitute.org.

To the future!

music, psychology, science, Sports, video

The Psychology of that one line in Call Me Maybe

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So, like, I heard this song the other day. It was by this indie band called “Carly Rae Jepsen.” You’ve probably never heard of them.

Actually *removes hipster glasses* while most of the appeal of “Call Me Maybe,” the song that dominated the summer of 2012, comes from its earnest simplicity, there is one line in the lyrics that has some real texture to it:

Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad

This line captures something universal and not at all trivial, the way that our memories of past emotions are reshaped by our current knowledge.

The thing is, we tend to think of ourselves as objective observers. We trust that our perceptions bear a one-to-one correspondence to the world around us. But the information that actually makes it from the outside world into our brains is much more limited and impressionistic. Our brains construct most of the details based on expectations about how the world works.

As William Wordsworth, the Carly Rae Jepsen of his time, wrote:

                            Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive;

While this perceiving-and-creating is a good description of our perceptions, it is even more true of our memories. When we attempt to recall how we felt about something in the past, it might feel like we are accessing internal CCTV footage, what we are actually doing is more like reconstructing those feelings on the basis of crayon sketch by a drunk three year old.

For those of you without drunk three year olds at home, what I mean is that there are a lot of details that need to be filled in. In the case of memories, one of the places we go for these details is our understanding of the world in the present.

Here’s an example. In one psychology study (citation below), participants were asked to predict how they would feel if their team lost the Superbowl, and they were all like, “OH MY GOD THAT WOULD BE THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!11!1!!!” But then, when their team actually did lose the Superbowl, they were like, “Whatevs, dude.”

That’s maybe not too surprising, but the interesting thing is that when these people were asked to recall how they predicted that they would feel, they tended to remember feeling like it would not have been that big a deal. That is, their recollection of their emotional state in the past was anchored to their emotional state in the present.

Similar results were found for studies on the 2008 presidential election, satisfaction from completing a major purchase, and how much they would enjoy eating jellybeans, depending on the order in which jellybeans of different flavors were eaten.

While “recall of predicted hedonic sequence” sounds like a totally awesome study, in a hookers-on-mars-with-three-boobs sort of way, this study was actually about eating jellybeans.

In “Call Me Maybe,” there are a couple of different ways to interpret the line “Before you came into my life I missed you so bad.” One possibility is that Carly Rae is, in fact, a time traveler from the future. At the age of twenty four, she met her one true soulmate. Unfortunately, he was ninety-six years old and was unable to keep up with her sexually. So, she traveled back to the year 2009, and then waited for her ripped-jeans Adonis to show up in her life on that hot and windy night.

A second possibility is that her emotional state after having met this guy colored her recollection of her emotional state in the time before she met him.

Here’s that video of the US Olympic Swim Team lip-syncing “Call Me Maybe.” While you’re watching it, I want you to try to remember how invested you were in the outcome of the Olympics back in July and August. Then notice how little you care about the Olympics in retrospect. Now, recognize that while you think you were all, “Olympics, Schmolympics!” at the time, you were actually all “USA! USA! That Ryan Lochte boy seems nice!”

Don’t you feel dumb?

Don’t own it? Here it is on iTunes.  Buy It!!icon

Meyvis, T., Ratner, R. K., & Levav, J. (2010). Why Don’t We Learn to Accurately Forecast Feelings? How Misremembering Our Predictions Blinds us to Past Forecasting Errors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139 (4), 579-589 : 10.1037/A0020285

religion, science

God has 4095 parameters

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So, over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, there is an explicit phylogenetic test of Evolution versus Creationism. With the help of the Akaike Information Criterion, Evolution wins!

Note, however, that this argument works in this specific form only for the Judeo-Islamo-Christian concept of God. Buddha is a Bayesian.

Read about it here.

biology, Books, Genetical Book Review, genetics, science

The Genetical Book Review: The Mapmaker and the Ghost

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So, remember when not all kids books were about teenage wizards and sexy vampires? Well, it turns out that, if you know where to look, you can still find books like that. Enter The Mapmaker and the Ghost, by Sarvenaz Tash.

[Disclaimer: Sarv is a friend of my wife’s. They got to know each other through the fact that both are in the New York area, and both had their debut middle-grade novels come out this year. If you are concerned that this may color the objectivity of this review, may I refer you to the Genetical Book Review’s premise and guidelines.]

The Mapmaker and the Ghost is a story that I would say is of the same general flavor as something like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The setting is very much our world, and the adventure is on a human scale. In the Mixed-Up Files, a girl and her younger brother run off to the museum, and get caught up in a quest to discover the provenance of a statue. In Mapmaker, a girl (Goldenrod) and her younger brother (Birch) find adventure in the woods at the edge of town, and get caught up in a quest to find a legendary blue rose.

The Mapmaker and the Ghost, by Sarvenaz Tash. Want to buy it already?
Settle down there, sparky! Purchase links will be available at the bottom of the post.

For kids, I think, the human scale makes the story directly relatable to their own lives. At least, that seems to be one of the things that our kid loved about the book. (He was nine at the time he first read it, and has reread it multiple times.) The concerns that the characters have, about curfews and money and permission to go past a certain point in the street, etc., seem to resonate with the experience of childhood in a way that very few authors pull off.

Of course, as in any good adventure, there are exciting things that happen that go well beyond what most children actually experience. But those events have an emotional impact that derives from the realism of the novel. I mean, saving the world from the most evil villain of all time is, of course, exciting, but evading the gaze of a security guard can actually be even more emotionally tense and exhilarating, because it is a situation that a young reader can really embody.

Also, there’s a gang of semi-feral kids with names like “spitbubble” and “snotshot,” a mysterious old lady, a secret lair, and, of course, a ghost.

The book is appropriate for ages 7 through probably about 12. The main character is a girl, but the novel is strongly gendered, and will be engaging for boys and girls. (If you have a son who thinks that they should not read a book like this because it is about a girl, you should definitely buy it, thump him over the head with it, and then watch him enjoy it anyway.)

Now, on with the science!

As I mentioned, the central quest in the novel is the search for a blue rose that blooms in the woods at the edge of town once every fifty years. This is a big deal, because, you know, roses aren’t blue. When you find a rose that is actually blue, it’s blue because it has been dyed blue.

A few years ago, a Japanese company called Suntory made news when they produced the world’s first non-dyed blue rose. They managed this through genetic engineering, taking a gene from a pansy and inserting it into a rose. [Insert juvenile and inappropriate joke here.]

Now, you’re probably looking at this rose and thinking that you have to be pretty colorblind (or have a job in Suntory’s marketing division) to call this “blue.” Fair enough, but, that’s the state of the art at the moment.

Suntory’s “blue” rose, which, while lilac a best, is still pretty cool. As an aside, we could also interpret this as an example of what linguists call “collocational restriction,” where the term “blue” has an idiomatic meaning in the specific context of the phrase “blue rose.” In this case, it might be interpreted as “bluer than a rose normally is,” much as “white coffee” is not actually white, but is at the white end of the distribution of coffee colors. (Image via Wired)

Here is Figure 1 from the publication of Suntory’s work, which shows the biosynthetic pathways responsible for plant color. You don’t find blue roses in nature because roses lack an enzyme in the pathway on the far right, which means that they lack any delphinidin-based anthocyanins.

Anthocyanins are the primary chemicals responsible for 

The gene that the researchers inserted into the rose is the one indicated by F3’5’H in the figure. This enzyme (flavonoid 3′,5′-hydroxylase) is normally absent from roses, which is why they lack the bluish pigments.

Although only one blue rose cultivar has been brought to market (The Suntory “Applause” pictured above), they actually did the transformation with a bunch of different cultivars. Here are a few examples (from the same paper).

In each panel, the flowers on the left are without the F3’5’H gene, and the ones on the right are with it.

If you read Japanese (or trust Google Translate), you can check out more information at Suntory’s dedicated blue-rose webpage, which features topics such as “Legend,” “Brand Concept,” and “Applause Wedding” (new!).

The authors note that there are various things one could imagine doing to make roses even bluer, including tinkering with the pH, getting other pigments in there, etc. How easy these next steps are going to be is less clear, though. It’s hard to tinker without breaking stuff. Perhaps genuinely blue roses will continue to be the symbol of unattainability, and limited to great kids’ books.

Katsumoto, Y., Fukuchi-Mizutani, M., Fukui, Y., Burgliera, F., Holton, T. A., Karan, M., Nakamura, N., Yonekura-Sakakibara, K., Togami, J., Pigeaire, A., Tao, G.-Q., Nehra, N. S., Lu, C.-Y., Dyson, B. K., Tsuda, S., Ashikari, T., Kusumi, T., Mason, J. G., & Tanaka, Y. (2007). Engineering of the Rose Flavonoid Biosynthetic Pathway Successfully Generated Blue-Hued Flowers Accumulating Delphinidin Plant Cell Physiol., 48 (11), 1589-1600 DOI: 10.1093/pcp/pcm131

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Buy it now!!

What’s that? You say you want to buy this book? And you want to support Lost in Transcription at the same time? Well, for you, sir and/or madam, I present these links.

Buy The Mapmaker and the Ghost now through:

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culture, science

Winning! Scientists drink the most coffee

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So, Dunkin’ Donuts has completed what is apparently their annual report on coffee consumption in the workplace (I always wondered what Dunkin’ Donuts did). Guess who won . . .

That’s right, scientists win, just like we win at everything!!!!

Marketing / PR Professionals? Losers!

Education administrators? Please!

Human Resources Benefits Coordinators? Wait, that’s its own category?

Check out the infographic from I heart coffee.

Politics, science

Support the Manhattan Project National Park

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So, you know how congress is always gridlocked because no one can ever agree on anything? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find something that everyone could agree on, so that we could chalk one up in the win column before the end of the current congressional term?

Well, here’s something. A bipartisan bill in congress would have created a National Park to commemorate the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for the development of the first Atomic Bomb during World War II. Unlike most National Parks, this one would be a multi-site park, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington.

Robert Oppenheimer an Leslie Groves at Trinity Site, in southern New Mexico, after the first atomic bomb test. (Image via the Santa Fe New Mexican). Oppenheimer later said that the test prompted him to recall this line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Edward Teller later said that the test prompted him to start singing “We Are the Champions” by Queen.

This should be a no-brainer for bipartisan support, right? I mean, Democrats love spending money we don’t have on frivolous things, and Republicans love to celebrate killing people in other countries, right? It’s a win-win!

I’m being facetious, of course. If you actually pay attention to politics, you know that Republicans also love to spend money that we don’t have, and that Democrats also love killing people in other countries, which makes this a win-win-win-win!

Okay, but to be actually serious, this park would be a great thing. Whatever your position on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, there is little question that the Manhattan Project represents one of the most important scientific and technological developments of the twentieth century, and one that completely transformed the world. A National Park dedicated to the project would create a space in which the context and all of the implications of the project could be discussed and remembered. The good stuff and the bad stuff are both a part of our history, and it is vital that we remember all of it, and how it all fits together.

Unfortunately, due to the incredible pile of dysfunction that is our current congress, the bill received more than 50% of the votes in the House of Representatives, thus failing to pass. You probably thought that crap only happened in the Senate, right? Somehow this relates to the bill’s coming up during a “suspension of house rules,” during which a supermajority is required to pass bills. It also has to do with Dennis Kucinich being a sanctimonious jackass and misunderstanding what the point of such a park would be. You can read about it at geekosystem, in a post that features a number gems like this:

While the Act handily made the simple majority that usually means passage for a bill, it fell 53 votes short of the supermajority and failed. Thus, for the time being, a cartoon avatar of it will be forced to sit on the steps of the House of Representatives, looking dejected and hoping for a chance to explain the political process to passing children.

Question: if there was a suspension of house rules, how is it that no one ran up and gave Kucinich a wedgie?

There’s still a chance that the bill could come up again before this congress calls it quits, so call your congressperson and tell them to vote for the thing!

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Disclaimer: one of the groups that has been pushing for the creation of this park is the Los Alamos Historical Society, the current president of which is one Ron Wilkins. My relatedness coefficient with Ron Wilkins is 0.5, and my patrilineal relatedness is 1.0.

Books, Genetical Book Review, science

The Genetical Book Review: The Half-Life of Facts

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So, today, Thursday, September 27, is the day that the book you’ve all been waiting for finally hits bookstores! What? No, not J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. I mean Sam Arbesman’s The Half-Life of Facts.

[Disclaimer: Sam is a friend and colleague. In particular, he has been a great supporter of the Ronin Institute. So, to be completely honest, if I had hated the book, I probably would not tell you. On the other hand, as per the general policy of the Genetical Book Review, if I had not enjoyed it, I would not have finished it, and would not have written about it at all.]

The Half-Life of Facts owes its inception to this article in the Boston Globe in which Sam introduced the concept of the “mesofact”:

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.  

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Mesofacts are the facts that disorient us. We do okay with fast-changing facts, which we expect to be different from day to day or from week to week. We also do okay with those facts that are stable enough that whatever we learned in elementary school is still true when we are picking up our grandchildren from elementary school. Mesofacts are the ones that are stable enough that we commit them to our long-term memory and then quit thinking about them. Then, years later, we are surprised when the “facts” we thought we knew turn out to be wrong.

The mesofact concept plays an important role in The Half-Life of Facts, but the book’s scope is actually much broader. It covers a host of topics related to how and why facts change. We learn, for instance, that (in contrast with the opening of the mesofacts article quoted above) the height of Mount Everest does change. Its actual height changes every year due to the uplift of the Himalayas, the melting of glaciers, etc. Also, our knowledge of its height has changed over time as measurement techniques have been improved.

We also learn about some of the science that studies how scientific knowledge changes over time. This field, called “scientometrics,”is one that the author has worked in, and the book includes first-hand accounts of a number of interesting studies.

[As an aside, doesn’t it seem like this field should have been called “scientology”? I think I’ll start referring to people who work in this area as “scientologists.” I sure hope that doesn’t cause any confusion.]

As Sam emphasizes in the book, individual changes in facts tend to be random, depending on serendipity of invention or discovery. However, if we zoom out a bit, we find that many facts change at regular rates, which can be empirically determined. You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles about every two years. Sam shows that analogous laws exist for all sorts of things, ranging from Roomba technology to the number of neurons from which it is possible to record simultaneously.

There are discussions of how facts spread through human populations and how our cognitive biases can prevent us from assimilating new facts. There are accounts of cutting-edge research on creativity in cities and historical accounts of scientific innovations, like when Francis Galton “ushered in the Statistical Enlightenment” by doing things like introducing fingerprinting to Scotland Yard and constructing “a map of beauty in the British Isles, based on how many pretty women he encountered in various locations.”

One such historical account is of the time that John Wilkins (no recent relation) invented the metric system. While I, as a red-blooded American, bear no truck with the metric system, which was clearly designed as a gateway to socialism, I do celebrate the achievements of all Jo(h)ns Wilkins.

So, now you’re asking yourself, “Is this the book for me?” The writing is very informal and accessible. For the most part, technical terms are eschewed entirely. Those few that are in there are defined clearly. So, the bar for entry is quite low. If you have an interest in how the world changes — and how our understanding of the world changes — you needn’t worry that the book will be over your head.

If you have an existing interest in these sorts of things, you will probably find that you are already familiar with a number of the book’s topics. However, you will also find a lot of things you probably did not know (like that there’s a Moore’s Law of average distance of daily travel in France!), as well as interesting tidbits about things you did know (like that Gordon Moore originally proposed his law on the basis of just four data points).

Perhaps the most salient thing that you will find in terms of the style of the book is Sam’s unrelenting and infectious enthusiasm. If you’re not a scientist, he does a great job of conveying why doing science is so cool. If you are a scientist, he will help to remind you why you loved science so much before years of dealing with funding and bureaucracy broke your spirit.

Personally, the thing that I loved about the book is the way that it presents science as a living, breathing, evolving thing, defined more by a process and a mode of discovery than by the collection of stale “facts” that you had to memorize for your high-school classes. Internalizing this vision of science is a large part of what graduate school is about. You spend years unlearning all of the stuff you spent the previous years learning. You learn that the correct, “scientific” answer to yes-or-no questions is almost always “yes, but . . .” or “no, but . . .” It is problematic in my view that we continue often to present science as black and white and finished both to lay audiences and to young scientists.

Maybe if enough people read this book, that fact will change.

Buy it now!!

What’s that? You say you want to buy this book? And you want to support Lost in Transcription at the same time? Well, for you, sir and/or madam, I present these links.

Buy The Half-Life of Facts now through:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble icon

indiebound

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poetry, science

Galaxy Poetry

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So, you know Galaxy Zoo? That’s the outfit that has been leveraging the power of millions of people who have grown tired of the excessive availability of pornography on the internet to help them to classify the shapes of millions of galaxies observed as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Well, they’ve got this cool thing where you can enter text, and it will render it in a sort of galaxy font, made up of galaxies that resemble letters. It’s not, you know, the most readable font in the world, but if you use this in your presentations, you’ll probably get less crap from design geeks than if you use comic sans.

Anyway, here’s an illustration, featuring a new poem, which is part of a series. The title of the series is still in flux, so it is presented here untitled.

A little hard to read, but some of the letters are awesome. And, you know, each one of these is a whole galaxy, which is, like, crazy.

Anyway, here’s the original text for those of you who don’t find satisfaction in extreme textual disorientation.

You believe in a
revolution that

comes like a billiard
ball, but Erica

knows the wind is made
of molecules and

lovers and guns and
copper coils spinning

around a common
belief in a spark

that destroys the world

It’s got a limit of 250 characters, but that’s at least long enough to translate all of Kim Kierkegaardashian’s tweets.

culture, neuroscience, science

Three questions about Jonah Lehrer

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So, the saga of Jonah Lehrer has kept trundling on, now with the publication in Slate of this article, where NYU Journalism professor Charles Seife describes what he discovered when he was asked by the editors of Wired to look into Jonah Lehrer’s past blog posts for evidence of “journalistic malfeasance,” including plagiarism, recycling (self plagiarism), “press-release plagiarism,” misrepresentation of quotes, and misrepresentation of facts.

The article is a must read if you have any interest at all in journalism, science, and/or schadenfreude.

For the past few years, Lehrer was the wunderkind of popular science writing. He was Malcolm Gladwell with a better haircut. Then, about a month ago, Michael C. Moynihan published this piece (also a must read, for all the same reasons), where he described his discovery that many of the quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in Lehrer’s most recent book, Imagine, were actually fabricated. More disturbingly, Moynihan described how Lehrer “stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied” to him when confronted with the fabrications.

The Moynihan piece followed on from some grumblings about Lehrer’s journalism, when it was pointed out that an that he wrote for the New Yorker was largely recycled from something he had previously written for the Wall Street Journal.

As I understand things, recycling is a fairly minor journalistic crime. It is not really misrepresentation, since you are still presenting your own material as your own. It is a bit of a violation of trust of the readers of the New Yorker, but if they had not read the Wall Street Journal piece, maybe there was little harm. And, I suspect that the overlap between New Yorker readers and WSJ readers is fairly small. The two entities that Lehrer actually screwed over were the New Yorker, who presumably thought that they were paying him for new material, and the Wall Street Journal, who presumably had some expectation that they were paying him for exclusive rights to the article.

The recycling prompted people to start looking more closely at Lehrer’s record, though, where they found a much more diverse and serious set of “journalistic malfeasances.” It seems that Lehrer is an egregious cherry picker, sifting through papers to find studies that support his thesis, irrespective of the quality of those studies or the existence of other studies that contradict it. He also apparently has a serious quotation problem, splicing together frankenquotes from different sources, presenting quotes gathered by other people as if he had gathered them himself, and when a convenient quote did not exist (or would require actual effort to discover), simply making quotes up. Furthermore, when specific errors were pointed out to him, he would nevertheless republish those same “errors” again and again. (Again, for the details, read Seife and Moynihan.)

I use quotation marks here because, while an original error might have been an actual error, in the sense of being an honest mistake, once you know it’s wrong, and you keep putting it out there, it becomes something different. A candidate word would be “lie.”

To me, the whole Lehrer fiasco raises three questions:

1. WTF?

I mean, look, this is a whole lot of crazy behavior. It reminds me of those movies, like Big or 13 Going on 30, where a kid suddenly wakes up in the body of an adult and finds themselves in way over their head. Except instead of teaching all of the other adults around them to reconnect with their inner child, they spin totally out of control and devolve into a murderous, narcissistic pathological liar.

Maybe sort of like what you would get if you cast Linday Lohan in a mashup of Freaky Friday and Carrie.

2. Who is to blame?

Sure, the obvious answer here is Jonah Lehrer. Curiously, Charles Seife’s article ends with this conclusion:

Lehrer’s transgressions are inexcusable—but I can’t help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I’m 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.

My twitter feed was full of responses along these lines of “You don’t need formal training to know that lying is wrong.” Agreed. If the only thing keeping most journalists from acting like Lehrer is the threat of a grumpy, old, cigar-chomping editor telling them to shape up (and then offering them a swig of whiskey from the flask they keep in the bottom drawer of their desk), we’re all in a lot of trouble.

(If you want to see a real psychopathic maestro at work, read this classic piece on Stephen Glass, who fabricated whole stories, and concocted elaborate schemes to fool his editors.)

On the other hand, there is something real here. The current trend in journalism is to cut down on editors and fact-checkers, increasingly relying on the competence and honesty of individual reporters. This might have important implications for how we evaluate journalism in the future. In the past, publications had reputations, but maybe in the future, journalistic reputations will be more personal. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

3: How is it that Jonah Lehrer has not yet been hired as a speechwriter for the Romney campaign?

Seriously, this guy has it all. Cherry-picking facts, making up other facts, bald-faced lying when confronted about it. In fact, I’m a little bit surprised he’s not on the ticket. Sure, Paul Ryan may have those dreamy blue eyes, but Jonah Lehrer’s glasses are so cool, he doesn’t even need eyes!