Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Conservatives have larger area of the brain associated with fear: study

Jinn · 01-06-2011, 09:10 AM

Since this somehow derailed into an argument about McDonalds (or is it guns?) I'll revitalize the thread with a recent post by that god-awful heathen PZ Myers, and I agree with him word for word.

The new phrenology : Pharyngula

Quote:

Morphological variation is important, it's interesting…and it's also common. It's one of my major scientific interests — I'm actually beginning a new research project this spring with a student and I doing some pilot experiments to evaluate variation in wild populations here in western Minnesota, so I'm even putting my research time where my mouth is in this case. There has been some wonderful prior work in this area: I'll just mention a paper by Shubin, Wake, and Crawford from 1995 that examined limb skeletal morphology in a population of newts, and found notable variation in the wrist elements — only about 70% had the canonical organization of limb bones.

... (snipped)

Quote:

I bring up this subject as a roundabout introduction to why I find myself extremely peeved by a recent bit of nonsense in the press: the claim that liberal and conservative brains have a different organization, with conservatives having larger amygdalas ("associated with anxiety and emotions") and liberals having a larger anterior cingulate ("associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life").

Gag.

I don't deny the existence of anatomical variation in the brain — I expect it (see above). I don't question the ability of the technique, using MRI, to measure the dimensions of internal structures. I even think these kinds of structural variations warrant more investigation — I think there are great opportunities for future research to use these tools to look for potential effects of these differences.

What offends me are a number of things. One is that the interesting questions are ignored. Is this variation genetic, environmental, or simply a product of slop in the system? Does it actually have behavioral consequences? The authors babble about some correlation with political preferences, but they have no theoretical basis for drawing that conclusion, and they can't even address the direction of causality (which they assume is there) — does having a larger amygdala make you conservative, or does exercising conservative views enlarge the amygdala?

I really resent the foolish categorization of the functions of these brain regions. Courage is an awfully complex aspect of personality and emotion and cognition to simply assign to one part of the brain; I don't even know how to define "courage" neurologically. Are we still playing the magical game of phrenology here? This is not how the brain works!

Furthermore, they're picking on a complex phenomenon and making it binary. Aren't there more than one way each to be a conservative or a liberal? Aren't these complicated human beings who vary in an incredibly large number of dimensions, too many to be simply lumped into one of two types on the basis of a simple survey?

This is bad science in a number of other ways. It was done at the request of a British radio channel; they essentially wanted some easily digestible fluff for their audience. The investigator, Geraint Rees, has published quite a few papers in credible journals — is this really the kind of dubious pop-culture crap he wants to be known for? The data is also feeble, based on scans of two politicians, followed by digging through scans and questionnaires filled out by 90 students. This is blatant statistical fishing, dredging a complex data set for correlations after the fact. I really, really, really detest studies like that.

And here's a remarkable thing: I haven't seen the actual data yet. I don't know how much variation there is, or how weak or strong their correlations are. It's because I can't. This work was done as a radio stunt, is now being touted in various other media, and the paper hasn't been published yet. It'll be out sometime this year, in an unnamed journal.