Macroevolution

(This is a copy of an essay that I published in 2006. I made some minor revisions to remove outdated context.)

Overheard at breakfast on the final day of a recent scientific meeting: "Do you believe in macroevolution?" Came the rely: "Well, it depends on how you define it."
                                                                         Roger Lewin (1980)

There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution.
                                                                         John Wilkins

The minimalist definition of evolution is a change in the hereditary characteristics of a population over the course of many generations. This is a definition that helps us distinguish between changes that are not evolution and changes that meet the minimum criteria. The definition comes from the field of population genetics developed in the early part of the last century. The modern theory of evolution owes much to population genetics and our understanding of how genes work. But is that all there is to evolution?

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.
               Roger Lewin (1980)

No. There's also common descent—the idea that all life has evolved from primitive species over billions of years. Common descent is about the history of life. In this essay I'll describe the main features of how life evolved but keep in mind that this history is a unique event that is accidental, contingent, quirky, and unpredictable. I'll try and point out the most important controversies about common descent.

The complete modern theory of evolution encompasses much more than changes in the genetics of a population. It includes ideas about the causes of speciation, long-term trends, and mass extinctions. This is the domain of macroevolution—loosely defined as evolution above the species level. The kind of evolution that focuses on genes in a population is usually called microevolution.

As a biochemist and a molecular biologist, I tend to view evolution from a molecular perspective. My main interest is molecular evolution and the analysis of sequences of proteins and nucleic acids. One of the goals in writing this essay is to explain this aspect of evolution to the best of my limited ability. However, another important goal is to show how molecular evolution integrates into the bigger picture of evolution as described by all other evolutionary biologists, including paleontologists. When dealing with macroevolution this is very much a learning experience for me since I'm not an expert. Please bear with me while we explore these ideas.

It's difficult to define macroevolution because it's a field of study and not a process. Mark Ridley has one of the best definitions I've seen ...

Macroevolution means evolution on the grand scale, and it is mainly studied in the fossil record. It is contrasted with microevolution, the study of evolution over short time periods., such as that of a human lifetime or less. Microevolution therefore refers to changes in gene frequency within a population .... Macroevolutionary events are more likely to take millions, probably tens of millions of years. Macroevolution refers to things like the trends in horse evolution described by Simpson, and occurring over tens of millions of years, or the origin of major groups, or mass extinctions, or the Cambrian explosion described by Conway Morris. Speciation is the traditional dividing line between micro- and macroevolution.
                                                                         Mark Ridley (1997) p. 227

When we talk about macroevolution we're talking about studies of the history of life on Earth. This takes in all the events that affect the actual historical lineages leading up to today's species. Jeffrey S. Levinton makes this point in his description of the field of macroevolution and it's worth quoting what he says in his book Genetics, Paleontology, and Macroevolution.

Macroevolution must be a field that embraces the ecological theater, including the range of time scales of the ecologist, to the sweeping historical changes available only to paleontological study. It must include the peculiarities of history, which must have had singular effects on the directions that the composition of the world's biota took (e.g., the splitting of continents, the establishment of land and oceanic isthmuses). It must take the entire network of phylogenetic relationships and impose a framework of genetic relationships and appearances of character changes. Then the nature of evolutionary directions and the qualitative transformation of ancestor to descendant over major taxonomic distances must be explained.
                                                                     Jeffrey S. Levinton (2001) p.6

Levinton then goes on to draw a parallel between microevolution and macroevolution on the one hand, and physics and astronomy on the other. He points out that the structure and history of the known universe has to be consistent with modern physics, but that's not sufficient. He gives the big bang as an example of a cosmological hypothesis that doesn't derive directly from fundamental physics. I think this analogy is insightful. Astronomers study the life and death of stars and the interactions of galaxies. Some of them are interested in the formation of planetary systems, especially the unique origin of our own solar system. Explanations of these "macro" phenomena depend on the correctness of the underlying "micro" physics phenomena (e.g., gravity, relativity) but there's more to the field of astronomy than that.

Levinton continues ....

Does the evolutionary biologist differ very much from this scheme of inference? A set of organisms exists today in a partially measurable state of spatial, morphological, and chemical relationships. We have a set of physical and biological laws that might be used to construct predictions about the outcome of the evolutionary process. But, as we all know, we are not very successful, except at solving problems at small scales. We have plausible explanations for the reason why moths living in industrialized areas are rich in dark pigment, but we don't know whether or why life arose more than once or why some groups became extinct (e.g., the dinosaurs) whereas others managed to survive (e.g., horseshoe crabs). Either our laws are inadequate and we have not described the available evidence properly or no such laws can be devised to predict uniquely what should have happened in the history of life. For better or worse, macroevolutionary biology is as much historical as is astronomy, perhaps with looser laws and more diverse objectives....

Indeed, the most profound problem in the study of evolution is to understand how poorly repeatable historical events (e.g., the trapping of an endemic radiation in a lake that dries up) can be distinguished from lawlike repeatable processes. A law that states 'an endemic radiation will become extinct if its structural habitat disappears' has no force because it maps to the singularity of a historical event.
                                                                 Jeffrey S. Levinton (2001) p.6-7

In conclusion, then, macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with microevolutionary theories, but macroevolutionary studies require the formulation of autonomous hypotheses and models (which must be tested using macroevolutionary evidence). In this (epistemologically) very important sense, macroevolution is decoupled from microevolution: macroevolution is an autonomous field of evolutionary study.
     Francisco J. Ayala (1983)

I think it's important to appreciate what macroevolutionary biologists are saying. Most of these scientists are paleontologists and they think of their area of study as an interdisciplinary field that combines geology and biology. According to them, there's an important difference between evolutionary theory and the real history of life. The actual history has to be consistent with modern evolutionary theory (it is) but the unique sequence of historical events doesn't follow directly from application of evolutionary theory. Biological mechanisms such as natural selection and random genetic drift are part of a much larger picture that includes moving continents, asteroid impacts, ice ages, contingency, etc. The field of macroevolution addresses these big picture issues.

Clearly, there are some evolutionary biologists who are only interested in macroevolution. They don't care about microevolution. This is perfectly understandable since they are usually looking at events that take place on a scale of millions of years. They want to understand why some species survive while others perish and why there are some long-term trends in the history of life. (Examples of such trends are the loss of toes during the evolution of horses, the development of elaborate flowers during the evolution of vascular plants, and the tendency of diverse species, such as the marsupial Tasmanian wolf and the common placental wolf, to converge on a similar body plan.)

Nobody denies that macroevolutionary processes involve the fundamental mechanisms of natural selection and random genetic drift, but these microevolutionary processes are not sufficient, by themselves, to explain the history of life. That's why, in the domain of macroevolution, we encounter theories about species sorting and tracking, species selection, and punctuated equilibria.

Micro- and macroevolution are thus different levels of analysis of the same phenomenon: evolution. Macroevolution cannot solely be reduced to microevolution because it encompasses so many other phenomena: adaptive radiation, for example, cannot be reduced only to natural selection, though natural selection helps bring it about.
     Eugenie C. Scott (2004)

As I mentioned earlier, most of macroevolutionary theory is intimately connected with the observed fossil record and, in this sense, it is much more historical than population genetics and evolution within a species. Macroevolution, as a field of study, is the turf of paleontologists and much of the debate about a higher level of evolution (above species and populations) is motivated by the desire of paleontologists to be accepted at the high table of evolutionary theory. It's worth recalling that during the last part of the twentieth century evolutionary theorizing was dominated by population geneticists. Their perspective was described by John Maynard Smith, "... the attitude of population geneticists to any paleontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups." (Maynard Smith, 1984)

The distinction between microevolution and macroevolution is often exaggerated, especially by the anti-science crowd. Creationists have gleefully exploited the distinction in order to legitimate their position in the light of clear and obvious examples of evolution that they can't ignore. They claim they can accept microevolution, but they reject macroevolution.

In the real world—the one inhabited by rational human beings—the difference between macroevolution and microevolution is basically a difference in emphasis and level. Some evolutionary biologists are interested in species, trends, and the big picture of evolution, while others are more interested in the mechanics of the underlying mechanisms.

Speciation is critical to conserving the results of both natural selection and genetic drift. Speciation is obviously central to the fate of genetic variation, and a major shaper of patterns of evolutionary change through evolutionary time. It is as if Darwinians—neo- and ulra- most certainly included—care only for the process generating change, and not about its ultimate fate in geological time.
     Niles Eldredge (1995)

The Creationists would have us believe there is some magical barrier separating selection and drift within a species from the evolution of new species and new characteristics. Not only is this imagined barrier invisible to most scientists but, in addition, there is abundant evidence that no such barrier exists. We have numerous examples that show how diverse species are connected by a long series of genetic changes. This is why many scientists claim that macroevoluton is just lots of microevolution over a long period of time.

But wait a minute. I just said that many scientists think of macroevolution as simply a scaled-up version of microevolution, but a few paragraphs ago I said there's more to the theory of evolution than just changes in the frequency of alleles within a population. Don't these statements conflict? Yes, they do ... and therein lies a problem.

When the principle tenets of the Modern Synthesis were being worked out in the 1940's, one of the fundamental conclusions was that macroevolution could be explained by changes in the frequency of alleles within a population due, mostly, to natural selection. This gave rise to the commonly accepted notion that macroevolution is just a lot of microevolution. Let's refer to this as the sufficiency of microevolution argument.

At the time of the synthesis, there were several other explanations that attempted to decouple macroevolution from microevolution. One of these was saltation, or the idea that macroevolution was driven by large-scale mutations (macromutations) leading to the formation of new species. This is the famous "hopeful monster" theory of Goldschmidt. Another decoupling hypothesis was called orthogenesis, or the idea that there is some intrinsic driving force that directs evolution along certain pathways. Some macroevolutionary trends, such as the increase in the size of horses, were thought to be the result of this intrinsic force.

Both of these ideas about macroevolutionary change (saltation and orthogensis) had support from a number of evolutionary biologists. Both were strongly opposed by the group of scientists that produced the Modern Synthesis. One of the key players was the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson whose books Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) and The Major Features of Evolution (1953) attempted to combine paleontology and population genetics. "Tempo" is often praised by evolutionary biologists and many of our classic examples of evolution, such as the bushiness of the horse tree, come from that book. It's influence on paleontologists was profound because it upset the traditional view that macroevolution and the newfangled genetics had nothing in common.

Just as mutation and drift introduce a strong random component into the process of adaptation, mass extinctions introduce chance into the process of diversification. This is because mass extinctions are a sampling process analogous to genetic drift. Instead of sampling allele frequencies, mass extinctions samples species and lineages. ... The punchline? Chance plays a large role in the processes responsible for adaptation and diversity.
        Freeman and Herron (1998)

We see, in context, that the blurring of the distinction between macroevolution and microevolution was part of a counter-attack on the now discredited ideas of saltation and orthogenesis. As usual, when pressing the attack against objectionable ideas, there's a tendency to overrun the objective and inflict collateral damage. In this case, the attack on orthogenesis and the old version of saltation was justified since neither of these ideas offer viable alternatives to natural selection and drift as mechanisms of evolution. Unfortunately, Simpson's attack was so successful that a generation of scientists grew up thinking that macroevolution could be entirely explained by microevolutionary processes. That's why we still see this position being advocated today and that's why many biology textbooks promote the sufficiency of microevolution argument. Gould argues—successfully, in my opinion—that the sufficiency of microevolution became dogma during the hardening of the synthesis in the 1950-'s and 1960's. It was part of an emphasis on the individual as the only real unit of selection.

However, from the beginning of the Modern Synthesis there were other evolutionary biologists who wanted to decouple macroevolution and microevolution—not because they believed in the false doctrines of saltation and orthogenesis, but because they knew of higher level processes that went beyond microevolution. One of these was Ernst Mayr. In his essay "Does Microevolution Explain Macroevolution," Mayr says ...

Among all the claims made during the evolutionary synthesis, perhaps the one that found least acceptance was the assertion that all phenomena of macroevolution can be ‘reduced to,' that is, explained by, microevolutionary genetic processes. Not surprisingly, this claim was usually supported by geneticists but was widely rejected by the very biologists who dealt with macroevolution, the morphologists and paleontologists. Many of them insisted that there is more or less complete discontinuity between the processes at the two levels—that what happens at the species level is entirely different from what happens at the level of the higher categories. Now, 50 years later the controversy remains undecided.
                                                                         Ernst Mayr (1988) p.402

Mayr goes on to make several points about the difference between macroevolution and microevolution. In particular, he emphasizes that macroevolution is concerned with phenotypes and not genotypes, "In this respect, indeed, macroevolution as a field of study is completely decoupled from microevolution." (ibid p. 403). This statement reiterates an important point, namely that macroevolution is a "field of study" and, as such, its focus differs from that of other fields of study such as molecular evolution.

If you think of macroevolution as a field of study rather than a process, then it doesn't make much sense to say that macroevolution can be explained by the process of changing alleles within a population. This would be like saying the entire field of paleontology can be explained by microevolution. This is the point about the meaning of the term "macroevolution" that is so often missed by those who dismiss it as just a bunch of microevolution.

The orthodox believers in the hardened synthesis feel threatened by macroevolution since it implies a kind of evolution that goes beyond the natural selection of individuals within a population. The extreme version of this view is called adaptationism and the believers are called Ultra-Darwinians by their critics. This isn't the place to debate adaptationism: for now, let's just assume that the sufficiency of microevolution argument is related to the pluralist-adaptationist controversy and see how our concept of macroevolution as a field of study relates to the issue. Niles Eldredge describes it like this ...

The very term macroevolution is enough to make an ultra-Darwinian snarl. Macroevolution is counterpoised with microevolution—generation by generation selection- mediated change in gene frequencies within populations. The debate is over the question, Are conventional Darwinian microevolutionary processes sufficient to explain the entire history of life? To ultra-Darwinians, the very term macroevolution suggests that the answer is automatically no. To them, macroevolution implies the action of processes—even genetic processes—that are as yet unknown but must be imagined to yield a satisfactory explanation of the history of life.

But macroevolution need not carry such heavy conceptual baggage. In its most basic usage, it simply means evolution on a large-scale. In particular, to some biologists, it suggests the origin of major groups - such as the origin and radiation of mammals, or the derivation of whales and bats from terrestrial mammalian ancestors. Such sorts of events may or may not demand additional theory for their explanation. Traditional Darwinian explanation, of course, insists not.
                                                              Niles Eldredge (1995) p. 126-127

Eldredge sees macroevolution as a field of study that's mostly concerned with evolution on a large scale. Since he's a paleontologist, it's likely that, for him, macroevolution is the study of evolution based on the fossil record. Eldredge is quite comfortable with the idea that one of the underlying causes of evolution can be natural selection—this includes many changes seen over the course of millions of years. In other words, there is no conflict between microevolution and macroevolution in the sense that microevolution stops and is replaced by macroevolution above the level of species. But there is a conflict in the sense that Eldredge, and many other evolutionary biologists, do not buy the sufficiency of microevolution argument. They believe there are additional theories, and mechanisms, needed to explain macroevolution. Gould says it best ....

We do not advance some special theory for long times and large transitions, fundamentally opposed to the processes of microevolution. Rather, we maintain that nature is organized hierarchically and that no smooth continuum leads across levels. We may attain a unified theory of process, but the processes work differently at different levels and we cannot extrapolate from one level to encompass all events at the next. I believe, in fact, that ... speciation by splitting guarantees that macroevolution must be studied at its own level. ... [S]election among species—not an extrapolation of changes in gene frequencies within populations—may be the motor of macroevolutionary trends. If macroevolution is, as I believe, mainly a story of the differential success of certain kinds of species and, if most species change little in the phyletic mode during the course of their existence, then microevolutionary change within populations is not the stuff (by extrapolation) of major transformations.
                                                         Stephen Jay Gould (1980b) p. 170

Naturalists such as Ernst Mayr and paleontologists such as Gould and Eldredge have all argued convincingly that speciation is an important part of evolution. Since speciation is not a direct consequence of changes in the frequencies of alleles in a population, it follows that microevolution is not sufficient to explain all of evolution. Gould and Eldredge (and others) go even further to argue that there are processes such as species sorting that can only take place above the species level. This means there are evolutionary theories that only apply in the domain of macroevolution.

The idea that there's much more to evolution than genes and population genetics was a favorite theme of Stephen Jay Gould. He advocated a pluralist, hierarchical approach to evolution and his last book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory emphasized macroevolutionary theory—although he often avoided using this term. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is a huge book that has become required reading for anyone interested in evolution. Remarkably, there's hardly anything in the book about population genetics, molecular evolution, and microevolution as popularly defined. What better way of illustrating that macroevolution must be taken seriously!

Macroevolutionary theory tries to identify patterns and trends that help us understand the big picture. In some cases, the macroevolution biologists have recognized generalities (theories & hypotheses) that only apply to higher level processes. Punctuated equilibria and species sorting are examples of such higher level phenomena. The possible repeatedness of mass extinctions might be another.

Remember that macroevolution should not be contrasted with microevolution because macroevolution deals with history. Microevolution and macroevolution are not competing explanations of the history of life any more than astronomy and physics compete for the correct explanation of the history of the known universe. Both types of explanation are required.

I think species sorting is the easiest higher level phenomena to describe. It illustrates a mechanism that is clearly distinct from changes in the frequencies of alleles within a population. In this sense, it will help explain why microevolution isn't a sufficient explanation for the evolution of life. Of course, one needs to emphasize that macroevolution must be consistent with microevolution.

I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
        Stephen Jay Gould (2002)

If we could track a single lineage through time, say from a single-cell protist to Homo sapiens, then we would see a long series of mutations and fixations as each ancestral population evolved. It might look as though the entire history could be accounted for by microevolutionary processes. This is an illusion because the track of the single lineage ignores all of the branching and all of the other species that lived and died along the way. That track would not explain why Neanderthals became extinct and Cro-Magnon survived. It would not explain why modern humans arose in Africa. It would not tell us why placental mammals became more successful than the dinosaurs. It would not explain why humans don't have wings and can't breathe underwater. It doesn't tell us whether replaying the tape of life will automatically lead to humans. All of those things are part of the domain of macroevolution and microevolution isn't sufficient to help us understand them.

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Do offensive pictures justify violence?

This video raises many complicated issues. It's a confrontation between students and anti-abortion protestors on the University of Oregon campus on March 10, 2015.

Most of the buzz on the internet is about the first policeman who tried to defuse a potentially violent confrontation by telling the main protestor that he did not have the right to free speech on a private university campus. He almost succeeded in getting the protestor to hide his offensive signs.

When the sargeant showed up, he overruled his officer and told the protestor he could display his signs and stay on the campus. I agree with the sergeant but I have a great deal of sympathy with what the first policeman was trying to do.

What is bioethics? Is Margaret Somerville a bioethicist or a Roman Catholic apologist?

I had an interesting conversation with a student the other day. She's studying "bioethics" at the University of Toronto. This is a program run by the Deptment of Philosophy.

I asked her to define "bioethics" and she couldn't. To her credit, she immediately recognized that this wasn't right. If she's taking an entire program in bioethics she ought to be able to explain what it was all about. She was then joined by her friend, who is also majoring in bioethics. My colleague, Chris DiCarlo also joined us. He's a philosopher writing a book on ethics.

We described a scenario where I wanted to end my life and Chris was willing to help me. Neither of us have an "ethical" problem with that decision. So why is assisted suicide thought to be a problem for bioethics? If some people don't want to participate in euthanasia then nobody is going to make them? Where's the problem?

Does it only become a bioethical problem if some people want to impose their views on others? In this case, the people who are personally opposed to euthansia want to pass a law preventing me from ending my life with the help of my friend. Our students were puzzled by this discussion. Even though they have taken many courses on bioethics, nobody had ever raised this issue. Isn't that strange? You would think that any program run by a Department of Philosophy would emphasize critical thinking. Sadly, this turns out to be rare whenever the topic of bioethics comes up.

Udo Schüklenk on Bioethics and Margaret Sommerville

Udo Schüklenk is a Professor of Philsophy at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His specialty is bioethics.

Udo gave a presentation at Eschaton 2012 on Myths About Atheist Values. He covered three topics ...

1. Are atheists moral? Yes

2. Does life have meaning or purpose? No, not the same kind of meaning and purpose that theists imagine.

3. Do atheists value human life? Yes.

Udo has a blog and one of the services he provides on his blog is to teach us about bioethics. Part of this service is to expose quacks masquerading as bioethicists. It's a thankless job but someone has to do it.

Fortunately, Udo concentrates on Canadian quacks so you won't be overwhelmed. There are only a few hundred, mostly doctors.

Perhaps Canada's most famous quack bioethicist is Margaret Somerville, a Professor of Law at McGill University, (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). She's best known for her opposition to same-sex marriage and she's been advertised on television and in newspapers as a bioethicist who has rational views on the dangers of legalizing same-sex marriage. (She wasn't very persuasive since same-sex marriage is legal in Canada.}¹

Udo Schüklenk chaired an experts panel on end-of-life decisions for the Royal Society of Canada [End-of-Life Decision-Making in Canada: The Report by the Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on End-of-Life Decision-Making].

Margaret Sommerville didn't like their recommendations. She claims that further legalization of euthanasia will lead to people being killed against their will.

Here's how Udo deals with that issue ...

Evidence has never been Ms. Somerville's strongest point. So, without any evidence to back up her claims she declares on the Catholic website, "One of the things that's wrong with respect to Justice (Lynn) Smith's judgment (in Carter v. Attorney General of B.C.) is that she purports to review the use of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in the jurisdictions that have legalized it. She said there is no problem, there is no slippery slope. Well, that's simply not right factually." It turns out, in our Report on end of life decision-making in Canada we reviewed the empirical evidence on the slippery slope matter and concluded that there is no evidence that assisted dying leads us down slippery slopes to unwanted killings. Of course, we reviewed evidence, Ms Somerville is in full preaching mode.

I like this guy! He thinks that real, scientific, "evidence" is an important part of any debate.

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1. We're anxiously waiting to see if her predictions about kids of gay parents being traumatized will come true.

The Ethics of Genome Analysis

Lots of people are having their genomes sequenced or otherwise analyzed for specific alleles. Those people should get all the information that comes out of the analyses although, hopefully, it will be scientifically correct information and any medical relevance will be explained by experts.¹

There's another group of people who submit their genomes for research purposes only and they usually sign consent forms indicating that their name will not be associated with the results. Under those circumstances, the researchers should never have access to the individual's name or any circumstances that are not relevant to the study.

Apparently that simple ethical rule is not always standard practice. Gina Kolatea writes about some ethical issues in the New York Times: Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter.

Here's an example from her article ...

One of the first cases came a decade ago, just as the new age of genetics was beginning. A young woman with a strong family history of breast and ovarian cancer enrolled in a study trying to find cancer genes that, when mutated, greatly increase the risk of breast cancer. But the woman, terrified by her family history, also intended to have her breasts removed prophylactically.

Her consent form said she would not be contacted by the researchers. Consent forms are typically written this way because the purpose of such studies is not to provide medical care but to gain new insights. The researchers are not the patients’ doctors.

But in this case, the researchers happened to know about the woman’s plan, and they also knew that their study indicated that she did not have her family’s breast cancer gene. They were horrified.

This is a rather simple case of the researchers violating a standard protocol. They should not have known the identity of the patient and they should not have known what she intended to do.

Most of the "ethical problems" in the article are of this type. They involve researchers who are supposed to be concentrating on research and not on the treatment of individual patients. Those researchers have no idea whether the patients already know which alleles they carry or whether they are already undergoing medical treatment. That's just as it should be. If a DNA donor doesn't want to be contacted then it's ethically wrong for the researchers to violate that contract no matter how justified they think they are being. Furthermore, it should be impossible for them to find out the name and address of the donor so the issue should never come up.

John Hawks thinks this is an interesting ethical problem and he wants his students to discuss it in his classes [Grasping the genomic palantir].

That case is ethically straightforward compared to others, because the researchers could make a difference to an immediate medical decision. On the other hand, how many risk-free research participants went ahead with prophylactic mastectomies because researchers didn't know about their plans?

I think the article will be a good one for prompting student discussions in my courses, and I'll likely assign it widely. But I think the central ethical problem discussed in the article is temporary.

What will students learn from discussing issues like these? What controls are in place to make sure that students are informed about all the ethical issues? Will they be told that standard scientific protocols were violated once the researchers knew what the patient intended to do?

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1. "Experts" do NOT include employees of any for-profit company that took money for sequencing the genome.

Guns and the Moral Law

 
From MSNBC and Associated Press: Police: Teen shot dead after Halloween prank.

ATLANTA — Authorities say a driver enraged after his Mercedes was splattered with eggs on Halloween fatally shot a 17-year-old in the neck and leg as the teen tried to run away.

Atlanta police spokeswoman Kim Jones says the driver confronted the teen and fired 10 shots at him around 8 p.m. Sunday. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's office says the teen, Tivarus King, died as he was being taken to Grady Memorial Hospital.

Just keep repeating to yourself, "Guns aren't the problem, criminals are the problem."

The real problem is that if you give a gun to a Mercedes owner in Atlanta he can soon become a criminal. (Ten Shots!)

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[Hat Tip: Greg Laden]

How to deal with scientists who cheat

 
What do you do when a scientists (PI, post-doc, graduate student) is caught falsifying data? Should they be expelled from the community, fired from their job, or given a slap on the wrist and rehabilitated?

This isn't an easy question as Janet Stemwedel demonstrates in Tempering justice with mercy: the question of youthful offenders in the tribe of science. I hate it when she does that. It would be so easy to conclude that cheating scientists should be drummed out of the profession but then along comes Janet to confuse me.

She's right, of course. There ought to be a range of punishments that fit the wide range of crimes and motives.

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Vaccine refuseniks are free-riders

 
There are some really interesting ethical issues associated with vaccinations. The advantages of vaccination benefit the entire community (the "herd") but not necessarily the individual. If everyone is vaccinated then one person can opt out without a great deal of risk. They get the benefit but don't pay the cost. They get a free ride.

Janet Stemwedel is interested in these ethical problems. Read what she has to say about those who refuse to vaccinate their children at Vaccine refuseniks are free-riders.

I wonder if there's a cultural difference when it comes to these kinds of problems? Are there some cultures who value the society more than the individual and others who value the individual more? If so, do they differ in the number of people who refuse to be vaccinated?

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An Ethical Question

 
Eva Amsen was reading a book in a student study lounge when she was asked to participate in a survey [Spent - Review]. The question was ....

It was a short questionnaire about what you would do if you were standing in line at the post office for more than 30 minutes, waiting to mail a package, and someone offered to take you to the front of the line in exchange for $3. Would you pay the three dollars or keep waiting?

My answer is different than Eva's so this got me thinking.

See the poll in the left sidebar. What would you answer?

Is there a "right" answer?

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Conservatives Condone Torture, Liberals Don't

 
Let me make this perfectly clear—in my opinion, any society that condones and practices torture is a society in which the rights of all individuals are diminished. The rights of individuals and the goal of a just society are qualitative traits, not quantitative traits. If some people are deprived of those rights and if some people aren't part of the just society, then the "rights" don't exist and the society is not just. You can't have the right to fair treatment under the law in some situations but not in others. That's a mockery of justice.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). The leadership of FDD consists of people like Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, Steve Forbes, and Joe Lieberman. They are "small-c" conservatives. Mostly Republicans, I think (including Lieberman, the Republican-in-all-but-name).

Last Saturday Gerecht wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times in defense of torture [Out of Sight].

He starts off by defending extraordinary rendition. This is the tactic of sending suspected criminals to other countries where they can be tortured and then returned to the USA. The idea is to be able to deny that the USA is in violation of its own Constitution and respect for human rights.

Mr. Obama will soon face the same awful choices that confronted George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he could well be forced to accept a central feature of their anti-terrorist methods: extraordinary rendition. If the choice is between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States, it is almost certain that as president Mr. Obama will choose the latter.

Aside from the fact that torture is legally and ethically wrong, there's three other slight problems with this tactic. First, who are they trying to deceive? Is there anyone with an IQ over 50 that can be fooled by extraordinary rendition?¹ Second, there's very little evidence that torture works. Third, many innocent people have been tortured.

Canada is particularly sensitive about rendition because of Maher Arar. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested in 2002 at Kennedy Airport in New York and send to Syria where he was tortured and confined for 10 months. He was subsequently released and the Canadian government has established that he is innocent [Canadian cleared of terrorism after rendition, torture in Syria].

We don't know how many other innocent people have been tortured but chances are the numbers are substantial. The problem with rendition is that the individuals are deprived of their right to face their accusers and prove their innocence. No respectable society should condone such behavior.

Gerecht then raises the standard canard that seems to be the last refuge of those who would violate people's rights.

However, troubles in Pakistan may well reverse Mr. Obama’s luck. He has said he intends to be hawkish about fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Central Asia. So, let us suppose that he increases the number of Special Forces raids into Pakistan, and those soldiers capture members of Al Qaeda and their computers, and learn that the group has advanced plans for striking American and European targets, but we don’t know specifically where or when.

What would Mr. Obama do? After all, if we’d gotten our hands on a senior member of Al Qaeda before 9/11, and knew that an attack likely to kill thousands of Americans was imminent, wouldn’t waterboarding, or taking advantage of the skills of our Jordanian friends, have been the sensible, moral thing to do with a holy warrior who didn’t fear death but might have feared pain?

No, Mr. Gerecht, torture is not a sensible, moral thing to do. It is stupid and immoral.

Stupid because the chances of finding out useful information under such circumstances are slim to zip. Stupid because under the Golden Rule we are putting the lives of all of our citizens at risk when they are captured by the bad guys. Stupid because it is contrary to the very thing that we are supposed to be fighting for. Stupid because the Americans who carry out rendition can be, and should be, put in jail. (I would even advocate that those who advocate breaking the law as almost as guilty.)

Immoral because .... never mind, he wouldn't know morality if it bit him on the posterior.

This issue is important in Canada for another reason. Our recently appointed Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, has a somewhat checkered history of modest support for torture. Recently his writings have been more clear about his opposition to torture while pointing out the moral dilemma [If torture works ...]. I'm going to quote extensively from his essay because this is a man who will be Prime Minister of Canada.

It is difficult to think about torture honestly. In a recent article on the interrogation techniques employed by the US, the writer Mark Bowden observed that few "moral imperatives make such sense on a large scale, but break down so dramatically in the particular." The moral imperative—do not torture, any time, anywhere, in any circumstances—is mandated by the UN convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency," says the convention, can "be invoked as a justification of torture." That terrorists themselves torture does not change these imperatives. Our compliance does not depend on reciprocity.

.....

Elshtain justifies coercive interrogation using a complex moral calculus of "dirty hands": good consequences cannot justify bad acts, but bad acts are sometimes tragically necessary. The acts remain bad, and the person must accept the moral opprobrium and not seek to excuse the inexcusable with the justifications of necessity.

My own work on "lesser evils" brings me close to the Elshtain position. I agree with her that necessity may require the commission of bad acts, which necessity, nevertheless, cannot absolve of their morally problematic character—but I still have a problem. If one enumerates the forms of coercive interrogation that have been judged to be inhuman and degrading by the Israeli and the European courts—hooding, holding subjects in painful positions, exposing them to cold or heat or ear-splitting noise—these techniques also seem unacceptable, though at a lower threshold of awfulness, than torture. Like Elshtain, I am willing to get my hands dirty, but unlike her, I have practical difficulty enumerating a list of coercive techniques that I would be willing to have a democratic society inflict in my name. I accept, for example, that a slap is not the same thing as a beating, but I still don't want interrogators to slap detainees because I cannot see how to prevent the occasional slap deteriorating into a regular practice of beating. The issue is not, as Elshtain implies, that I care overmuch about my own moral purity but rather that I cannot see any clear way to manage coercive interrogation institutionally so that it does not degenerate into torture.

So I end up supporting an absolute and unconditional ban on both torture and those forms of coercive interrogation that involve stress and duress, and I believe that enforcement of such a ban should be up to the military justice system plus the federal courts. I also believe that the training of interrogators can be improved by executive order and that the training must rigorously exclude stress and duress methods.

Two significant problems remain. First of all, there is the problem of the exceptional case, one where lives can be saved by the application of physical methods that amount to torture. "Ticking bomb cases" cannot be wished away. They might arise especially where an American or European city faced the threat of WMD. An outright ban on torture and coercive interrogation leave a conscientious security officer with little choice but to disobey the ban. In this event, as the Israeli supreme court has said, even a conscientious agent acting in good faith to save lives should be charged with a criminal offence and be required to stand trial. At trial, a defence of necessity could be entered in mitigation of sentence, but not to absolve or acquit. This is the only solution I can see that remains consistent with an absolute ban on torture and coercive interrogation. Let us not pretend that the enforcement of this rule would be easy. Where the threat could be shown to be genuine, it seems evident that few legal systems would punish such a conscientious offender. So an outright ban on torture creates the problem of the conscientious offender. This is a small price to pay for a ban on torture.

Does an outright ban on torture and coercive interrogation meet the test of realism? Would an absolute ban on torture and coercive interrogation using stress and duress so diminish the effectiveness of our intelligence-gathering that it would diminish public safety? It is often said—and I argued so myself—that neither coercive interrogation nor torture is necessary, since entirely lawful interrogation can secure just as effective results. There must be some truth to this. Israeli interrogators have given interviews assuring the Israeli public that physical duress is unnecessary. But we are grasping at straws if we think this is the entire truth. As Posner and others have tartly pointed out, if torture and coercion are both as useless as critics pretend, why are they used so much? While some abuse and outright torture can be attributed to individual sadism, poor supervision and so on, it must be the case that other acts of torture occur because interrogators believe, in good faith, that torture is the only way to extract information in a timely fashion. It must also be the case that if experienced interrogators come to this conclusion, they do so on the basis of experience. The argument that torture and coercion do not work is contradicted by the dire frequency with which both practices occur. I submit that we would not be "waterboarding" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—immersing him in water until he experiences the torment of nearly drowning—if our intelligence operatives did not believe it was necessary to crack open the al Qaeda network that he commanded. Indeed, Mark Bowden points to a Time report in March 2003 that Sheikh Mohammed had "given US interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen key al Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks." We must at least entertain the possibility that the operatives working on Sheikh Mohammed in our name are engaging not in gratuitous sadism but in the genuine belief that this form of torture—and it does qualify as such—makes all the difference.

If they are right, then those who support an absolute ban on torture had better be honest enough to admit that moral prohibition comes at a price. It is possible, at least in theory, that subjecting interrogators to rules that outlaw torture and coercive interrogation, backed up by punishment if they go too far, will create an interrogation regime that allows some interrogation subjects to resist divulging information and prevents our intelligence services from timely access to information that may save lives.

If there is a significant cost to an outright ban on coercive interrogation and torture, what can possibly justify it? Many of the arguments that human rights activists make in justification amount to the claim that torture shames their moral identity as human beings and as citizens, and that they do not wish such acts to be committed in their names. Other citizens in a democracy may not value their own moral scruple over the collective interest in having accurate security information, even if collected by dubious means. It may be obvious to human rights activists how to adjudicate these claims, but it is not obvious to me. That is, I do not see any trumping argument on behalf of the rights and dignity of security detainees that makes their claims prevail over the security interests (and human right to life) of the majority. The best I can do is to relate the ban on torture to the political identity of the democracies we are trying to defend—by claiming that democracies limit the powers that governments can justly exercise over the human beings under their power, and that these limits include an absolute ban on subjecting individuals to forms of pain that strip them of their dignity, identity and even sanity.

We cannot torture, in other words, because of who we are. This is the best I can do, but those of us who believe this had better admit that many of our fellow citizens are bound to disagree. It is in the nature of democracy itself that fellow citizens will define their identity in ways that privilege security over liberty and thus reluctantly endorse torture in their name. If we are against torture, we are committed to arguing with our fellow citizens, not treating those who defend torture as moral monsters. Those of us who oppose torture should also be honest enough to admit that we may have to pay a price for our own convictions. Ex ante, of course, I cannot tell how high this price might be. Ex post—following another terrorist attack that might have been prevented through the exercise of coercive interrogation—the price of my scruple might simply seem too high. This is a risk I am prepared to take, but frankly, a majority of fellow citizens is unlikely to concur.

I'm more skeptical than Ignatieff about the efficacy of torture. Just because lots of people do it does not sound like a good argument for defending the usefulness of torture.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the bottom line, I'm with Michael Ignatieff, "We cannot torture ... because of who we are." If there's a price to be paid for doing the right thing then I'm prepared to pay it and suffer the consequences.

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1. Apparently patriotic conservatives are easily fooled—that's why I set the cutoff IQ so high.

[Hat Tip: daimnation! via Canadian Cynic]

The Ethical Frontiers of Science

 
I'm at the Chautauqua Institution this week where the theme is The Ethical Frontiers of Science.

Today's speaker was Arthur Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. His topic was "Is it Immoral to Want to Live Longer, Be Smarter and Look Better?" The answer is no, it is not immoral. There's nothing wrong with wanting to take advantage of modern scientific advances to prolong life, enhance intelligence, and look better." I agreed with everything he said.

Caplan looked over the speakers for the rest of the week. Many of them are his friends and he's very familiar with their views. That's why he was able to congratulate us for coming to the first lecture. "It will be the highlight of the entire week," he said, "because all the other speakers are wrong." I suspect he's right but it will be fun, nevertheless, hearing what some of them have to say.

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Kristin Roovers Punished for Falsifying Data

 
Kristin Roovers was a post-doc at the Ottawa Health Research Institute in Ottawa (Canada) until last week. Her job was abruptly terminated when OHRI learned that she had been convicted and punished for falsifying data while she was a graduate student and a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania. Apparently they first heard that something was wrong from an article in The Chronicles of Higher Education [Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research].

Read about it in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen [Researcher's tainted past leads Ottawa health facility to sever ties]. See the fraudulent data on baylab [Kristin-gate at the OHRI].

You can read the July 2007 report from the Office of Research Integrity (USA) at Case Summary - Kristin Roovers.

Here's the question. Why was she hired at OHRI? They probably didn't ask for letters of reference and they certainly didn't Google her name.

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Eating Clones

 
We eat cloned organisms every day, but they're plants (e.g., bananas).

Apparently, some people have a great fear of eating cloned animals. Is this irrational fear an "ethical" problem? The underlying question is how do we define an ethical problem? Just because some people incorrectly see a problem where none exists, are we obliged to bow to their definition of "ethics."

Join the discussion on Balblab [Clonal Discrimination].

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This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking ...

 
Researchers from Stemagen a private stem-cell research company in California, have created human clones by the same techniques used to clone other mammals. The clones only went through a few cell divisions before being discarded [Ethical storm as scientist becomes first man to clone HIMSELF].

There's nothing remarkable about the science. It's one step toward cloning humans using standard procedures that have been worked out over the past three decades. What's remarkable is the reaction to this announcement. I'm still having trouble figuring out what is the ethical problem here.

I think it's all related to abortion. If you are opposed to allowing a woman to decide what to do with her own body then you're also against stem cell research. The "ethical issue" is mostly confined to religious people (men?) who oppose abortion. At least that's how it appears to me.

Stemagen isn't doing anything wrong; they make this clear on their webpage.

All research at Stemagen is performed in strict accordance with US Federal Regulations for the ethical treatment and protection of human subjects covered in the 45 CFR Part 46 policy issued by the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP). More specifically, this requires that all research involving human eggs, embryos or human subjects be approved and carefully monitored by an independent Institutional Review Board (IRB) composed of members of the medical and general community, with additional ethical and legal expertise sought when required.

Those who choose to donate oocytes (eggs) and embryos for this type of research do so through informed consents that follow the guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research from the National Academy of Sciences (www.nationalacademies.org).

Stemagen's mission is to maintain exemplary standards in human embryonic stem cell research in accordance with the highest ethical and research principles.

This is an important point in so-called "ethical" debates. The scientists are not being unethical and many observers, like me, don't see any ethical problem. Others see an ethical problem as described in the newspaper article.

John Smeaton, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: "We have got scientists wandering around in an ethical wilderness, forgetting about matters of justice relating to our fellow human beings.

"We have people creating human beings with the intention of destroying them. That's appalling."

And the Vatican condemned the cloning of human embryos, calling it the "worst type of exploitation of the human being".

"This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking," said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church's position on bioethics issues.

Here's the issue. At what point does something become an "ethical" issue for society? How many people have to be against something on "ethical" grounds" in order for it to become an ethical problem?

What if their objections are irrational? For example I imagine that US Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is against stem cell research but his reasons are likely to be as ridiculous as his reasons for opposing same-sex marriage. Does that still count as an ethical problem? It seems to me that elevating stupidity to the level of "ethics" is not the way we want to go.

Why couldn't the headline have been "No Ethical Problem, According to Most Atheists?" Why do we let religious groups define ethics for us? I don't subscribe to their version of ethics, do you?

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Take a Short Quiz on Cheating - Do You Agree with the First Year Engineering Students?

 
What freshman engineering students think about cheating.

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Hugh McLachlan on Cloning Humans

 
Last week I posted an article on cloning humans. It was a reference to a piece in New Scientist by Hugh McLachlan, a Professor of ethics at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland (UK). McLachlan does not oppose the cloning of humans and neither do I.

Here are some other articles on the same topic [Ignore The Boys from Brazil - say Yes to human cloning], [Poor reasons for making human cloning illegal].

McLachlan sent me the following message in response to some of his critics. It addresses some of the issues that have come up in the comments on Sandwalk. He has given me permission to post it.

I think that the risks to the embryos are irrelevant to the issue of whether or not human cloning should be illegal. (Whether public money should be spent on human cloning if it is a very inefficient technique is another matter.) The potential mothers should be informed about the known risks and they must, of course, give their consent. The risk to the mothers is not a justification for making the technique illegal in my view.

Consider an analogy. Imagine that 100 people were trapped, unconscious in a building. They might, for instance, be hostages. A bomb might be primed to explode shortly. If they are not rescued fairly soon they will die. Suppose that the only way they could be rescued is if they were snatched by SAS. The snatch might kill them all. It might result in some being injured, impaired and disabled. It might even result in some living a life that was not worth living. However, there is a chance that one or more might survive to live a normal life. Should we take the chance and snatch them? If we are thinking only about the interests of those 100 people, we must do it even if the chances are remote that any will be saved.

To say that it should be illegal to make the snatch because of the risk to the hostages would be absurd. It is similarly absurd to say that, because of the risks to the embryos involved, human cloning should be illegal.

There is a risk to the soldiers. However, since people volunteer to be soldiers and might even volunteer for particular dangerous missions it is generally judged acceptable that soldiers are exposed to such risks. I can see no reason why we should not allow potential mothers to accept the risks of delivering clones if that is what they want to do.

The objection about the risks to the embryos/clones involved looks at the issue of risk and uncertainly the wrong way round. Suppose that some technique or other were devised to reduce the suffering of those people who had some particular relatively minor ailment. The question of the risk of the technique to these potential patients might be relevant particularly if we assume that to live with the ailment is still pleasant and worthwhile even if not as pleasant and worthwhile as life without the ailment. Suppose that, with the technique, the likelihood is that X% of the patients will be cured completely of the ailment, Y% will end up with a worse case of the condition and that Z% will die in the course of treatment.

In a situation such as this, it is important to know what numbers X, Y and Z stand for to try to judge whether the risk involved in worth taking. Ideally, we would tell the patients and let them decide for themselves. However, human cloning is quite different from this imagined scenario. For the people who might be born as a result of cloning - whether, in the event, they actually are born - cloning is their only chance of birth and life. In the absence of cloning, they will not be born. Hence, cloning is not a risk for them but an opportunity - their only opportunity. To make cloning illegal in their interests on the grounds that, in the course of the technique, not all implanted embryos will become healthy mature human bodies is absurd.

Should Cloning Humans Be Legal?

 
In the July 21 issue of New Scientist, Hugh McLachlan thinks that we should legalize cloning of humans [Let's legalise cloning].

But why are we so against the idea of cloned human babies? As a bioethicist specialising in reproductive issues, I believe it has more to do with an irrational fear of cloning than any logical reason. All the arguments in favour of a ban describe risks that we accept quite easily and naturally in other areas of reproduction.

One argument against human cloning is the idea that it is morally wrong or undesirable to create replicas of people. But although a clone has the same gene set as the adult from which it was cloned, environmental factors will ensure that the resulting individual is not an identical copy, either psychologically or physically. What's more, we accept genetically identical people in the form of twins. If anything, clones would be less alike than twins because they would be different ages and be brought up in different contexts. Objecting to cloning on these grounds makes no sense.

I agree with McLachlan. Aside from the safety issue, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to forbid the cloning of humans.

This is a topic that's frequently discussed in "ethics" classes. I've never really understood what "ethics" actually means—but I'm working on it. The cloning of humans isn't an ethical issue for me personally because there isn't a conflict between two versions of what I think I ought to do. However, maybe it's an ethical issue for society as a whole because there are some people who think that it is unethical to clone people. Is that right? What's unethical about it?

Do we define "ethical" issues in terms of conflict between different groups? If so, is there a way of distinguishing between issues where the two sides are almost equally represented and those where one side has an overwhelming majority? For example, is the cloning of humans still an ethical issue in a society where 99% of the population is opposed? Does it cease to be an ethical issue if 99% are persuaded to accept human cloning?

Who Owns Your Lab Notebooks?

 
When post-docs and graduate students finish their projects in a research laboratory they leave their notebooks behind. Those belong to the principal investigator who runs the lab. Graduate students often have a hard time understanding this policy so Janet Stemwedel explains it on Adventures in Ethics and Science.

The original article is Lab notebooks and graduate research: what should the policy be? and the followup is Kept all my notebooks; what good are notebooks?.

This is a good example of an ethical problem in science.

The Ethics of Stem Cell Research

 
Arthur Caplan is the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. He was written an article on the MSNBC website that addresses the new work on reprogramming cells to produce totipotent stem cells [Does stem cell advance provide an ethical out?].

He claims that the new work will not replace conventional creation of embryonic stem cell lines using embryos because the new procedure has only been shown to work in mice and because it involves retrovirus vectors. This may be true, although Rudi Jaenisch seems to be more optimistic [see Reprogramming Somatic Cells].

I'm interested in another part of Caplan's essay where he says,

As much as critics of this field of research would like to have you believe that human embryos in dishes are people, that moral argument is not compelling.

Human embryos in dishes are not people or even potential people. They are, at best, possible potential people.

Frozen embryos in infertility clinics face a fate of certain destruction anyway. The moral case against using them, or cloned embryos, which have almost zero chance of becoming people, is no less compelling because progress has been made in another area of research.

The existence of a new way to perhaps make embryonic-like stem cells is not enough to make frozen embryos and cloned embryos off-limits for American scientists or for research relying on federal funds.

Those in favor of human embryonic stem cell research, and that is the majority of Americans according most polls, including one done by CNN just last month, do not have to change their minds about the morality of such research even when another avenue for creating embryonic-like cells is found in mice.

What Caplan fears is that those who are opposed to destroying embryos will use this new work to reinforce their opinion that a ban must be enforced. This is almost certainly correct but there's little that he can do to change their minds.

What puzzles me is that Caplan argues the case that these embryos are not humans—in fact they are not even "possible potential" humans. This seems to be typical of the sort of debate that passes for ethics these days. I don't get it.

For those of us who are pro-abortion the argument makes no sense at all. We are already committed to the concept that real potential humans can be destroyed so the destruction of earlier stages poses no problem whatsoever. We simply don't care to debate whether embryos at the pre-blastula stage are human or not since the decision has no bearing on whether they should be destroyed.

For those who oppose abortion, and the destruction of embryos, the declaration that they are not even "possible potential" humans rings hollow. For them, the issue is not going to be settled by scientists. If it were, it would not be an "ethical" issue at all but a simple scientific problem. For many of them the facts are quite obvious. God created man and woman to make babies and any direct interference in that process is an attempt to disrupt the process that God intended.

This is a group who distrust scientists from the get-go. The idea that they are going to allow men in white lab coats to poke at human embryos just in order to advance their careers is a non-starter. Remember, most of this group doesn't even believe in evolution or a 4.5 billion year old Earth. Why should they believe what scientists have to say about embryos?

So what's the point of making the argument about the "humanness" of embryos, especially from someone who is director of bioethics at a major university? Who is he trying to convince, George Bush? Where are Mooney and Nisbet when we need them? Caplan needs a lesson on spin framing.

I have recently discovered that there are many moral realists in philosophy departments. This group believes that there is an underlying "truth" behind every ethical problem and it is the goal of ethical reasoning to discover this "truth." I wonder what the "truth" is about destroying embryos in order to create stem cells? I would have thought that the definition of moral truth depends on your cultural/religious background but I'm told that this "ethical relativism" is very much a minority position among philosophers.

[Hat Tip: Shalini at Scientia Natura: Stem cell breakthrough]

Take the Carnegie Mellon University Survey on Ethical Standards

 
This is a survey on ethics developed by workers at Carnegie Mellon University for readers of the New York Times [Survey on Ethical Standards]. We can take the survey thanks to John Tierney and his blog TierneyLab: Putting Ideas in Science to the Test [Test Your Ethics (or Lack Thereof)].

The nice thing about this survey is that you can instantly see how you answered the questions relative to everyone else who took the survey. I was very pleasantly surprised at some of the responses. If you take the survey, make sure you do it alone and in a private place. You must answer all questions honestly and you may not want friends or relatives to know your answers. Try it, and then see how everyone else answered the questions.

I've been trying to stimulate some discussion about ethics without much success [Ethical Issues in Biochemistry]. There's a growing tendency in science education to include classes on ethics but nobody seems to be able to define ethics in a way that makes sense to me. What, exactly, is an ethical issue? [see, Ethics on Wikipedia] Take the survey to see if your sense of "ethics" agrees with others.

The other problem is how do you teach ethics to undergraduate science students? What are the basic principles of ethical reasoning? Is ethical relativism a valid philosophy or are there some "rules" that every undergraduate should memorize? [see, Moral Relativism on Wikipedia] I've encountered scientists who claim that we need to teach students that ethical relativism is a failed philosophy and there really is a "right" and a "wrong."

Here's a question that's not on the survey. Does whether or not you would have your genome sequenced [Sequencing Jim Watson] count as an ethical question? I don't think so. It's a question about personal preferences and the answer depends very much on how you feel personally about issues such as privacy. This isn't "ethics" as far as I'm concerned.