Home again [cats]

In the end, it took 8 hours to get Emma to the emergency vet and then seen/treated. They gave her an antibiotic, anti-nausea, and saline injection after I said I'd book an appointment with her regular vet ASAP to do a bunch of needed follow-up bloodwork.

While I waited to pick her up, I watched a father and two daughters troop inside of the clinic, which can't be a good sign. Later, they trooped back out again, the daughters crying, no animal in sight.

What a challenging environment to work in. At least they don't have to deal with an endless stream of dying people expressing regrets about failing to get a certain vaccine.

Emma mostly just slept overnight and is still mostly just sleeping/resting today. Not eating a ton. The follow-up appointment is in progress. It was still the right decision to bring her in yesterday; if she was indeed experiencing an infection it would only have gotten worse.



Can you tell she doesn't enjoy having her picture taken?




Meanwhile, the raspberry bush continues to do its thing:


Classes start tomorrow. I'm not sure I'm ready.

Galileo's Middle Finger [books]

This was a book recommended and given to me by annikusrex, by Alice Dreger. I want to talk about the book, but at the same time before I really dive in I also want to comment that the book's author is a person who has decided to not shy away from some very sensitive subjects. I'm actually not going to talk much about those particular sensitive subjects and instead am going to focus on a couple of bigger-picture theses to come out of the book.

Part of the book's basic premise has to do with how social/scientific/political controversies arise; Dreger bills herself as a historian and bioethicist who got her start studying and trying to understand how intersex individuals have historically been [mis]treated within the American healthcare system. She puts strong emphasis on appropriate use of evidence and long-term outcomes to then encourage changes in healthcare practices. (e.g. in this case arguing against early-life invasive "interventions" to "normalize" intersex individuals).*

This perspective is woven together with a series of stories about specific individuals within specific narrow research fields who have been attacked for expressing unpopular views, essentially. I think my only real complaint in that realm is that some of the depicted individuals are painted with slightly too broad a brush ("good guys" / "bad guys") when I suspect the reality may slightly more often be that people are complex and not always so good or bad; sometimes people resort to ad hominem attacks because their more concrete concerns and objections haven't been heard.

To give an example from my own research field, Dreger seems to side favorably with E.O. Wilson for his early work in the realm of sociobiology, which means less attention is given to some of the reasonable objections that other biologists have raised in response to some of Wilson's ideas; those other biologists are portrayed as character assassins instead, and sloppy ones, at that. (I apologize that I can't provide more concrete examples of this here at this time). In the larger context of the book, Wilson is a side figure, but because of what I know more specifically in this domain, about some of the individuals who have raised objections to some of Wilson's ideas, and the nature of those objections, I'm skeptical of any wholesale dismissal of any other people in the book as sloppy character assassins. In general, reality tends to be more complex.

However, I am in agreement with the basic assertion that there's a rather shocking and harmful lack of fact-checking both in primary "scientific" research and in scientific/investigative journalism these days, and I don't doubt what Dreger writes about the dropoff in investigative journalism over the last couple of decades in conjunction with the rise of internet media. I can't comment on the extent to which the situation is the same/better/worse for the primary scientific literature, which has ballooned in volume, but I do agree that the extent of this slop has a direct impact on anything we might measure as an indicator of "progress" in the highlighted research fields. And this is actually where I might somewhat part ways with Dreger; I have a feeling that she may still operate within the basic structure and understanding put forth in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is a framework based on the notion of progress. I tend to see a more persistent entanglement between the state of a given society and what its scientists promote, and am more agnostic about the notion of "progress." If I'm remembering correctly, some of this way of thinking is more clearly articulated by Levins and Lewontin in The Dialectical Biologist. (And this then comes back to Wilson; Lewontin was a major critic of Wilson's, not in a friendly way.)

But what do I know, for I am still but a lowly small peanuts liberal-arts college professor who spends way too much time trying to make sure my citations are accurate, meaning my publication volume is small and modest.

In any case, in spite of the above critiques, this does seem like a book worth reading, if only to gain an appreciation for the very precarious basis on which a lot of medical interventions rest.



*I am very much in agreement with her stance on this; I don't think invasive surgical interventions are appropriate until the individual experiencing them is old enough to understand the consequences and give informed consent.