Whoo, boy, I do love this here internet thing. As you can see over the past couple of days I’ve been following the new outbreak of concern over the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and its claimed connection with autism. As I’ve said it doesn’t take all that much intelligence to see that the story doesn’t have all that much behind it.

But then I come across the blog Not Mercury and their post Snakes on a Plane. Which provides that very intelligence to show that the story is, how to put this mildly, somewhat less than scientifically based?

The first point is that this most recent story is not from a scientific paper, not from something which has been peer reviewed. No, it’s from a poster at a conference. For those unfamiliar with that phrase there’s a heirarchy of how seriously one should take a report about science. A published paper means that other scientists have looked at it and checked that there are no obvious errors. A speech or presentation at a conference means that other scientists are interested in hearing about the research and questioning the researcher. A poster means that the scientist behind the research would like to have a paper published or give a conference speech….but that no one else is interested.

It has also been portrayed as being independent confirmation of the theories of one Andrew Wakefield. Except, as Not Mercury shows, it isn’t actually independent: Wakefield now works with the people making this new claim. That isn’t, in any way, what is meant by “independent” in science.

It is, of course, possible that there is something to this story, that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Anything and everything is possible, including the idea that Claudia Schiffer will declare her undying love for me. However, we do rather need to have some idea of the probability of such things happening and in science at least (rather than my daydreams) we rely upon evidence to help us calculate that. Evidence, at this point, which seems to be singularly lacking.

Sigh. More reports on the claimed link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Here at Peds Residency and at the Family Resource blog.

As I pointed out yesterday there are other more convincing explanations for the rise in autism: associative mating being one of them. There’s also the point that diagnosis is getting better, and that what used to be called “a little odd” is now considered to be an autism spectrum diagnosis.

But what is so appalling about this link between the MMR vaccine and autism is that even if it were true, children should still be vaccinated. You don’t need a college degree in history or medicine (OK, actually, perhaps you do need such a college degree: people seem to have forgotten) to know quite how dangerous these diseases are. Rubella (German Measles), if caught by a pregnant woman, causes the most appalling injuries to the fetus. Blind, deaf and profoundly mentally damaged. It’s obviously to everyone’s benefit that all are vaccinated against this. Mumps? In one percent of cases it causes infertility in males. Yes, that’s one percent. It doesn’t matter much as a child, it’s something that passes (the disease that is) but it is something that, without vaccination, pretty much everyone will get at some time or another.

Measles is even worse. There’s just been the first death in decades in the UK: precisely and exactly caused by people not vaccinating their children as a result of this autism fear. Just to show how bad it is (and remember, it is a viral disease. We do notknow how to cure any viral diseases at all), consider the Faroe Islands. They’re a pretty isolated group out in the North Atlantic. In the 17 th and 18 th centuries, measles swept through the islands in three or more waves. Each and every time it killed 30 % of the population.

We really don’t want people to stop vaccinating their children.

Over the weekend a number of newspapers have been reporting that new evidence has been found to link autism with the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. As you know, here, we base our view of autism on the research of Simon Baron-Cohen, the designer of our EQSQ personality tests. His view is essentially that autism is an expression of an extreme form of the male type brain, an excessively systemising one. He goes further and suggests that the rise in incidence of autism is to do with associative mating: in past times, who one married was limited, as now, by who one could meet. But the group of people you could meet was limited to a much greater manner than it is now. Limited by geography, for example. Nowadays, most people meet through work (or friends from work), and much of the working world throws people with similar character traits together, in a way that didn’t happen before.

If certain things are genetically inherited, most especially the character traits like systemizing, empathizing and so on, then if like is marrying like more often then we would expect to see more of the extremes of such traits. This is exactly what Baron-Cohen is saying about autism. There’s more on this here and here.

On the MMR autism link Autism Vox has a couple of pieces. I should have known when I saw that the news had broken in the Mail. This isn’t a new paper, it isn’t peer reviewed and it hasn’t been published. It’s a poster presentation at a conference. There is no control group. This is about the lowest level of “science” there is, one step above a blog post.

Well, yes, OK, we all know about those differences. But there are also some non-obvious physiological differences between men and women and here’s another one. Nothing to do with our EQSQ personality tests, as those are based on mental differences, rather this is a purely physical one (which, as you can imagine, a personality test isn’t going to uncover).

As Public Health Digest, Straight Out of Newport and The Mystery News all state (with varying levels of glee) researchers have recently shown that alcohol is good for your heart. Now, as with anything at all, moderation is necessary, so no, downing a bottle of vodka for breakfast isn’t going to keep your heart pure and well functioning. Rather it would stop it some minutes after your liver failed. However, one drink a week can reduce the risk of heart disease by 7%, and a drink every day can reduce it by a whopping 41%. Pretty good news eh?

Well, sorta…you see those are the figures for men. For women, one drink a week does indeed reduce the risks of heart disease, but more than that does not.

And then again, there’s another sorta here: from the point of view of the long married man. Once a week you can suggest a glass or two of wine with dinner as it is so good for both of you, but the other six nights, I’m afraid you will have to be selfish and go alone to the pub gym for your cardiovascular exercise.

There’s an old saying that beauty times brains is a constant: that lookers aren’t all that bright and that the bright tend not to look good, so that everyone ends up with about the same amount of total genetic good fortune. However comforting this might be to those like myself who refuse to possess mirrors (Eeeek! I look like that?) it turns out not to be true. As reported at Stumbling and Mumbling it turns out that good looking people also do better at exams and tests.

The effect is quite pronounced: for men, those who are one standard deviation better looking than average, as opposed to those one SD below, get 38% better grades. However, this is mostly because the really terrible looking ones get very bad grades (so that explains that low grade college degree of mine!). With women it’s a little different. Anything from mirror avoider to pleasant doesn’t make much difference, with beauty giving higher grades.

Now, it isn’t absolutely certain that intelligence is what gets people better college degrees: application has as much to do with it. But if we stick with our idea that intelligence and beauty go together, the question is why? One idea put forward was that the good lookers get more attention from teachers. More teacher time might mean more education actually sticking with the student. My own was a little more controversial (especially as I know so little biology): beauty is largely defined as symmetry and symmetry comes from a combination of good genes, an absence of disease and good nutrition both as a fetus and a child.

Not too surprising if these also correlate with good brain development and thus intelligence.

Overnight I’ve been thinking a little more about the comments at the Scobelizer which were the basis of yesterday’s post. Those who take our EQSQ personality tests will obviously (as this is what personality tests do) gain an insight into their own brain type. Systemizing (or male brain type), empathizing or balanced. We can also make some pretty good guesses about what sort of job or career would suit each type. Clearly, nursing is a job requiring great empathy and cutting software code one needing extremely strong systemizing traits.

However, this isn’t necessarily true for all jobs within such sectors. While nursing and health care in general might need empathy there are jobs within the sector that almost require an absence of it. A pathologist, for example, heartily hopes never to meet a live patient and a billing coder (for which at least a basic medical education is necessary) can go through an entire career without meeting one.

In the supposedly systemizing sectors like computing or high tech I think the same is becoming true (or the opposite if you prefer) in that empathizers, those with female brains, are becoming much more necessary. It’s a point that Virginia Postrel has made repeatedly, that the basic gizmos, the machines on their own, are becoming an ever smaller part of the value of the whole. The design, the look and feel, the image almost, of the product create far more value now, something which really is rather something that empathizers create.

After all, as Timothy pointed out in the comments, there are many competitors to an iPod. In fact, most of them are cheaper and do a great deal more as well. Still the iPod that outsells all the others though.

Apologies, I haven’t found the statistical evidence on male and female commenting styles that was raised yesterday: but I have found this very interesting piece by Robert Scoble on the lack of what he calls A-List female bloggers. His comments make great sense in the light of our EQSQ personality tests.

The first point is that Robert is very specifically talking about high tech blogs, by those in the industry. Which, given the likely preponderance of systemizers in the industry, means that, as defined by our personality tests, we’d expect a huge preponderance of men. And Robert does indeed complain that Microsoft’s internal culture is heavily male dominated.

The second is simply that blogs are still a pretty young industry/idea. As they’ve very much grown out of the tech world, we’d expect to see it tech dominated to start and then as it spreads, become less sex specific. Which I certainly think is happening for I know a number of niches that are heavily female: now that it’s becoming a tool to converse about anything, not just typically male things, more women are using it. There’s also the point that to be an A-List blogger now you needed to start three years ago: which very few women did.

Finally Robert makes a very useful point about the way the tech industry as a whole is going: needing much more of those female (or female brain type) skills like empathy. We can now do pretty much anything with a computer that we might desire: the trick is working out what it is that people might indeed desire. Very different from how the business has previously worked, which is how to make that piece of silicon actually do anything at all.

Both Marketing Profs Daily and Pickled Politics have noted that there’s an imbalance in the numbers of men and women who comment on their blog posts. Both seem to get to roughly two male commenters for every female one: although the anecdotal evidence from the comments to the posts seem to indicate that this varies hugely across blogs depending upon the subject matter.

Quite how this fits in with the results of our EQSQ personality tests I’m not sure as yet. I can think of two possible scenarios. One is that men are simply more likely (or if we take our personality tests as our base, those with male type brains, something we know is rather different) to make a comment, to vent their spleen at whatever is being said. This might seem reasonable but as Ann Hadley says, since when have women (or those with female type brains) been reticent with their opinions?

The alternative is that it is the subject matter of those two blogs. One is about the business or marketing, the other about progressive Asian politics in the UK. Perhaps these simply attract male and female readers in those proportions, rather than there being any difference in how likely people are to comment?

Something of a mysterious title there I know. SATs are the Scholastic Aptitude Tests taken by high school students as part of their college application tests. G is a measure of intelligence. As Dienekes’s Anthropology Blog points out there’s been a study done breaking down 100,000 of these results and showing the differences between male and female results.

Now, the main result was that male scores were higher than female to a significant statistical degree. That, however, is not the point which either I or they think so fascinating. Do you remember when Larry Summers got into so much trouble over saying that perhaps women weren’t going to be as good as men at the hard sciences? Except that’s not actually what he really said. His point was rather that there is greater variation in men, on almost any measure which is (as IQ is at least in part) genetically determined. That means that when you look at the extremes, at the very tails (whether good or bad, top or bottom) of the distribution, you’d expect to see more men there than women.

This statistical study of SAT scores seems to bear this out…but only at the top end. If our theory is to be correct we should also see more men amongst the very low scores too, right? I think the answer is in fact that the males who would have those very low scores simply don’t actually take the SATs. High school dropouts and those not going to college don’t, obviously, take a test to get them into college. The rate of dropping out from high school is higher amongst men to start with and the entry rate into college is more skewed again in favor of women. So we don’t see the higher number of men we would expect in the lowest scoring group simply because they don’t take the test.

You can, if you like, think about this by analogy with our EQSQ personality tests. As we know from previous blogs (and do remember that these are personality tests, not diagnostic tools) we expect to see more variation in men’s scores. Just as with other parts of Simon Baron-Cohen’s research, we see many more men amongst the autistic. In fact, just as we see many more men amongst the extremes of any, as stated above, genetically determined distribution.

Well, OK, an article of revelations really. But what fun they are!. Allan Pease has been quoted on the subject of the differences between men and women in a piece that was originally, I think, for MSNBC. I haven’t been able to track down the original source but it’s been spread across the net. There’s copies here and here, here, here and here.

It’s quite fun, looking at a bit of evolutionary psychology to show why men are better at spatial recognition tasks and so on (although I’m not 100 % certain about some of his explanations) but he does of course miss one major point. That many of the things he discusses are not in fact specifically male or female. They may be liklihoods, probabilities, but they are not specific to the possession or not of a Y chromosome.

They are, rather, specific to the possession of a male or female type brain. Which means looking at our EQSQ personality tests above. There’s a lot more information spread around this blog, of course, but the essential idea is that while most men may be systemizers (or have a male brain) and most women empathizers (or have a female brain) this isn’t actually true of all. You can take the personality tests yourself if you’d like, they are free after all.

The one figure that jumped out at me from his piece was that 60% of men forget birthdays and anniversaries while only 16% of women do. The explanation being that such things are emotional events, something that women will be better at remembering.

Now from yesterday we actually saw the figures for how many men have a male or systemizing brain: 54%. And also how many women do: 17%. That looks remarkably close to the figures above (as close as most social sciences get at least) so I think we might be able to make a prediction here (or perhaps a conclusion is better?).

You would in fact think that systemizers would remember birthdays better: after all, they’re more likely to write them down in their diary somewhere. Seems that this is not in fact so and it is the empathizers that actually remember, such anniversaries being quite emotional events. And the numbers of women who don’t remember them and of men who similarly forget? Very much the same as those for the number of systemizers in each sex.

Hey, this is pretty good! Agreement with a theory from a different set of facts is another step along the road to confirmation!