débat mutaliste (6)
Les hommes sont en moyenne un peu plus intelligents que les femmes. Telle
est la conclusion politiquement, psychologiquement et sexuellement très
incorrecte que J. Philippe Rushton et al. tirent d'une étude sur 100.000
Américains ayant passé un test cognitif, le SAT (Scholastic Assessment
Test). La différence est de 3,63 points de QI en faveur des jeunes mâles
(sur une moyenne conventionnelle de 100 points, et avec un écart-type de 15
points environ, d'ailleurs un peu plus élevé chez les mêmes mâles que chez
les femelles). En fait, plusieurs autres travaux récents avaient déjà trouvé
cette différence.
Garçons et filles ont le même QI jusqu'à l'adolescence (12-15 ans), mais les
garçons creusent peu à peu l'écart. La raison en est sans doute une
maturation plus lente du cerveau, qui leur permet de gagner sur le tard
quelques connexions neuronales dans la matière grise. Cette différence de QI
se retrouve dans tous les niveaux socio-économiques et dans les sept groupes
ethniques étudiés.
Rappel utile : ces mesure de moyennes sur des populations (échantillons
larges) ne permettent évidemment pas de déduire des jugements individuels.
Vous ne pouvez donc pas dire à votre copine ce soir : tu es moins
intelligente que moi, cela signifierait que vous n'avez rien compris aux
statistiques. Et que vous êtes probablement moins intelligent qu'elle. Mais
ces résultats vont sans doute attiser les débats en cours aux Etats-Unis sur
la rareté des femmes dans certaines postes scientifiques et techniques.
Depuis un an que Lawrence Summers, président de Harvard, a suggéré que cette
non-parité pourrait voir une base biologique, le psychodrame bat son plein
outre-Atlantique.
***
Males have greater G: sex differences in general mental ability
A study of 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the SAT
At each and every every level of family income, for every level of fathers¹
and of mothers¹ education, and for each and every one of seven ethnic
groups, males had higher g scores than females
A study of 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test
published in the September 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence, has
confirmed a surprising new finding-that men have a 4- to 5-point IQ
advantage over women by adulthood. Because girls mature faster than boys,
the sex difference is masked during the school years, which explains why the
sex difference was missed for 100 years.
A study published in the September 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence
analyzed 145 items from the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) in 100,000 17-
to 18-year-olds and found a male IQ advantage of 3.63 points.
It also found that the g factor--the general factor of mental ability
underlay both the SAT Verbal (SAT-V) and the SAT Mathematics (SAT-M) scales
with the congruence between these components greater than 0.90, and that it
was the g factor that predicted student grades better than the traditionally
used SAT-V and SAT-M scales.
The male and the female g factors were congruent in excess of .99, and they
favored males to an equivalent of 3.63 IQ points.
The male-female differences were present at every socioeconomic level, and
across several ethnic groups.
The average male advantage was found "throughout the entire distribution of
scores, in every level of family income, for every level of fathers' and of
mothers' education, and for each and every one of seven ethnic groups," said
J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western
Ontario, one of the authors of the study.
The paper's results dovetail with those from several other recently
published studies showing that men--surprisingly--have a 4- to 5- IQ point
advantage over women by late adolescence and early adulthood. Before that
age the two sexes are equal in general intelligence.
As such, the findings overturn a 100 year consensus that men and women
average the same in general mental ability.
Because girls mature faster than boys, the sex difference is masked during
the school years. Since almost all the data showing an absence of sex
differences were gathered on school children, this might explain why the sex
difference was missed for so long.
For decades, however, psychologists have accepted that men and women differ
in their test "profiles," with males averaging higher on tests of "spatial
ability" and females higher on tests of "verbal ability." These differences
were assumed to average out.
The authors of the study, psychologists Douglas N. Jackson and J. Philippe
Rushton at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the study because
two recent sets of observations had raised anew the question of sex
differences in general intelligence.
The first was that the general factor of mental ability--g--was found to
permeate all tests to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, a "spatial" test may
be relatively high on g (mental rotation) or low (perceptual speed), a
"verbal" test may be relatively high (reasoning) or low (fluency), as may a
"memory" test be high (repeating a series in reverse order) or low
(repeating a series in presented order).
More than any other factor, the test's g loading best determines a test's
power to predict academic achievement, creativity, career potential, and job
performance. Hence, the question of sex differences became formulated more
precisely as: "Are there sex differences on the g factor?"
Another set of observations concerned the sex difference found in brain size
and the relation between brain size and cognitive ability. Studies published
in 1992 at the University of Western Ontario by zoologist C. Davison Ankney,
and also by psychologist Rushton, showed men average a 100-gram advantage
over women in brain weight (and volume).
A 1997 study in Denmark documented that men have 15% more neurons than women
(22.8 versus 19.3 billion).
Over two-dozen Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies have confirmed a
brain-size/IQ correlation of about 0.40. So, if males average a larger
brain, shouldn't they also average a higher IQ score?
British psychologist Richard Lynn at the University of Ulster in Northern
Ireland, and Paul Irwing at the University of Manchester found that adult
men consistently average 4 to 5 IQ points higher than adult women in a
series of recent large-scale studies using a number of intelligence tests in
various countries. (Irwing & Lynn's most recent paper appeared in Nature on
July 6, 2006.)
Other researchers too have found a male advantage in general mental ability,
including Prof. Helmuth Nyborg at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, who
earlier this year was disciplined by his university for talking to the media
about his "politically incorrect" conclusions.
Prof. Rushton agreed that "these are unpopular conclusions." He said, "only
more data can determine the true nature of sex differences in cognitive
ability. However, people should not be made to feel afraid to study
controversial issues."
Prof. Rushton accepted that sex differences in general mental ability could
help explain the "glass ceiling" phenomenon.
But he also noted the paradox that although men may have higher IQ scores,
women do increasingly well in school exams.
It will be very hard to argue that selection bias caused the sex difference
in this data set, the authors wrote. "That would require the assumption that
there are hypothetical respondents who, if tested, would provide a
compensating female-male advantage in g that would counterbalance the
findings. They would have to be found at every level of SAT performance, in
every level of family income, for every level of fathers' and of mothers'
education, and for every ethnic group examined."
###
Corresponding author: J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology,
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada Email:
Rushton@uwo.ca Tel: 519-661-3685
On the Web: Article pdf:
http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton_pubs.htm
Full Citation: Jackson, D. N., & Rushton, J. P. (2006). Males have greater
g: Sex differences in general mental ability from 100,000 17- to
18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test. Intelligence, 34, 479-486.
Cerveau, justice et magot : comment une petite zone cérébrale nous fait souvent faire de grosses conneries
Une région de cerveau pourrait limiter notre égoïsme naturel et expliquer la naissance de la justice dans les sociétés humaines. C’est en tout cas l’hypothèse lancée par Ernst Fehr, un économiste zurichois. Ce dernier, avec ses collègues, a étudié, via stimulation électromagnétique transcrânienne, l’influence d’une région cérébrale précise, le cortex préfrontal dorsolatéral, dans l’appréhension commune de l’équité et de l’injustice.
Les humains sont en effet les seuls animaux, dans l’état actuel de nos connaissances, à agir méchamment afin de rendre la « justice », à punir des gens qui se sont comportés « injustement » et ce même si la punition n’est pas dans l’intérêt du punisseur. Il a été jusqu’alors difficile d'expliquer cette tendance en termes évolutionnaires, parce qu'elle semble n’avoir aucun avantage adaptatif évident, tant la punition de l'injustice peut quelquefois léser le punisseur lui-même.
A l'aide du « jeu de l’ultimatum », les chercheurs ont identifié la partie du cerveau responsable dans la punition de l'injustice. Des sujets ont été apérés de façon anonyme, chaque partenaire recevait 20 $ qu’il était invité à partager avec son compagnon. Il pouvait choisir d’offrir n’importe quelle quantité et, si l’autre l’acceptait, chacun gardait son butin. Dans le cas où il refusait, tout le monde perdait. Selon un modèle purement économique où l’intérêt personnel prime toujours, personne ne devait refuser l’offre, même si elle était vraiment basse (inférieure ou égale à 1 $) mais dans la réalité, les receveurs dénigraient presque systématiquement l’offre, empêchant ainsi à l’autre de garder le reste. En désactivant via stimulation électro-magnétique intracrânienne le cortex préfrontal dorsolatéral, les receveurs étaient plus enclins à accepter toute sorte d’offre.
***
Sense of justice discovered in the brain
• 19:00 05 October 2006
• NewScientist.com news service
• Helen Phillips
A brain region that curbs our natural self interest has been identified. The studies could explain how we control fairness in our society, researchers say.
Humans are the only animals to act spitefully or to mete out "justice", dishing out punishment to people seen to be behaving unfairly – even if it is not in the punisher's own best interests. This tendency has been hard to explain in evolutionary terms, because it has no obvious reproductive advantage and punishing unfairness can actually lead to the punisher being harmed.
Now, using a tool called the “ultimatum game”, researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness. Subjects were put into anonymous pairs, and one person in each pair was given $20 and asked to share it with the other. They could choose to offer any amount – if the second partner accepted it, they both got to keep their share.
In purely economic terms, the second partner should never reject an offer, even a really low one, such as $1, as they are still $1 better off than if they rejected it. Most people offered half of the money. But in cases where only a very small share was offered, the vast majority of "receivers" spitefully rejected the offer, ensuring that neither partner got paid.
Fehr's fair
Previous brain imaging studies have revealed that part of the frontal lobes known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC, becomes active when people face an unfair offer and have to decide what to do. Researchers had suggested this was because the region somehow suppresses our judgement of fairness.
But now, Ernst Fehr, an economist at the University of Zurich, and colleagues have come to the opposite conclusion – that the region suppresses our natural tendency to act in our own self interest.
They used a burst of magnetic pulses called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – produced by coils held over the scalp – to temporarily shut off activity in the DLPFC. Now, when faced with the opportunity to spitefully reject a cheeky low cash offer, subjects were actually more likely to take the money.
The researchers found that the DLPFC region's activity on the right side of the brain, but not the left, is vital for people to be able to dish out such punishment.
"The DLPFC is really causal in this decision. Its activity is crucial for overriding self interest," says Fehr. When the region is not working, people still know the offer is unfair, he says, but they do not act to punish the unfairness.
Moral centre?
"Self interest is one important motive in every human," says Fehr, "but there are also fairness concerns in most people."
"In other words, this is the part of the brain dealing with morality," says Herb Gintis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, US. "[It] is involved in comparing the costs and benefits of the material in terms of its fairness. It represses the basic instincts."
Psychologist Laurie Santos, at Yale University in Connecticut, US, comments: "This form of spite is a bit of an evolutionary puzzle. There are few examples in the animal kingdom." The new finding is really exciting, Santos says, as the DLPFC brain area is expanded only in humans, and it could explain why this type of behaviour exists only in humans.
Fehr says the research has interesting implications for how we treat young offenders. "This region of the brain matures last, so if it is truly overriding our own self interest then adolescents are less endowed to comply with social norms than adults," he suggests. The criminal justice system takes into account differences for under-16s or under-18s, but this area fully matures around the age of 20 or 22, he says.
Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1129156)
He bien je constate que les mutants sont frénétiques en ce moment. Je suis heuereux de voir que je fais partie des membres les plus actifs (voyez mon oeuvre!). Peut être faudrait-il signifier que la version bêta n'est plus pour que les gens reviennent.
Sinon le silence comme forme de mutation? Je dois dire que j'ai quelques doutes.
Bien que je me considère comme plutôt oisif, je me situe loin de l'état végétatif. Peut être bien que tout le monde travaille, qu'on a pas le temps de s'occuper de discuter sur internet, dans ce cas les mutants pourraient muter vers une forme de myspace où on laisserait des commentaires et où on aurait 35765 amis...
Vous êtes une femme ? Vous n’avez pas d’enfant ? Vous en avez cinq ou plus ? Vous en avez moins, mais vos enfants ont moins de 18 mois d’écart entre eux ? Gare à votre santé au troisième age, et gare à ne pas mourir plus jeune que les autres, car vous êtes sur la mauvaise pente. C’est en tout cas ce que révèle une étude du Conseil de la recherche économique et sociale (ESRC) britannique. Les résultats se fondent sur trois bases de données, britanniques et américaines, sur des femmes nées à partir de 1911. Pour Emily Grundy, responsable de cette étude, si l’on savait déjà que les tous premiers temps de vie avaient une influence sur la santé et la mortalité ultérieure, c’est la première fois que l’on met en lumière l’impact de la parenté et du mode d’appariement, tous contextes socio-économiques confondus. Si l’élevage d’enfants à la chaîne semble délétère pour la santé, le mariage ou toute forme de relation sentimentale stable et durable, au contraire, auraient un effet protecteur pour les femmes comme pour les hommes. Un père de plusieurs enfants rapprochés, s’il cumule en plus un ou plusieurs divorces et séparations, risque de ne pas faire de vieux os. Idem pour les femmes s’étant reproduites avant 21 ans : leur santé, mentale en particulier, est bien plus médiocre à 53 ans que celles qui ont un peu plus attendu. Les principaux facteurs seraient pour Emily Grundy les stress psychologiques et physiques induits par ces expériences. Néanmoins, en ce qui concerne les femmes sans enfants, le communiqué de presse n’est pas très bavard. Par contre, les femmes donnant naissance à leur premier enfant à plus de 40 ans auraient aussi plus de chances de perdurer dans l’existence. Même si Emily Grundy conçoit ici que le fait de mettre un enfant si « tard » au monde est la preuve d’une bonne santé préalable. On comprend maintenant pourquoi Madonna est la reine du monde !
**
Public release date: 11-Sep-2006
Contact: Annika Howard
annika.howard@esrc.ac.uk
44-017-934-13119
Economic & Social Research Council
Childless women risk poorer health in later life
Childless women run the risk of earlier death and poorer health in later life. A new study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) finds that not only childless women but also mothers of five or more children, teenage mothers and mothers who have children with less than an 18 month gap between births all have higher risks of death and poor health later in life.
Findings are based on a study of three separate datasets of women born from 1911 onwards in Great Britain and the USA. "We already know quite of lot about the impact of a person's very early life or their socio-economic history on health and mortality in later life," explains researcher Professor Emily Grundy of the Centre for Population Studies, School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London. "But, in this study we were able to analyse the long-term health implications of a person's partnership and parenting experiences while taking into account education and other indicators of socio-economic status as well."
The study reveals that partnership and parenting experiences are important influences on later life health. "We show, for example, that having a short birth interval of less than 18 months between children carries higher risks of mortality and poor health," Professor Emily explains. "That finding is particularly interesting because, to our knowledge, it's the first time that later health consequences of birth intervals have been investigated in a developed country population."
Fathers whose wives have short birth intervals also appear to suffer slightly increased mortality risks. Researchers suggest that the physiological and psychosocial stresses associated with caring for young children close in age may be the important factor.
This study also provides further evidence of the link between teenage motherhood and poorer health in later life. It also reveals that teenage mothers have poorer mental health at age 53 than other mothers. "What's particularly interesting here is that our findings indicate poorer health outcomes for women who have children before age 21 regardless of their socio-economic circumstances in childhood," Professor Grundy points out. Previous research has shown that many teenage mothers had already experienced poor health in early childhood. But, this study indicates the higher risks of poorer later life health for teenage mothers whatever their background.
At the other end of the motherhood age scale, this study reveals that women who have a child over the age of 40 experience better health in later life. But the reason, researchers suggest, is not necessarily that having children later makes women healthier rather that women who conceive at that age must already be in good health and feel fit enough to bring children up.
In terms of the influence of partnership on later life health and mortality, this study confirms other research which indicates that marriage provides more health gains for men than women. For men, spending a long time in a stable marriage and avoiding multiple marriages and divorce contributes to long-term health.
For women, too, marriage may be better for their health than they currently believe. The study shows that when self-rating their health, married women report poorer health than unmarried women. But the mortality rates of unmarried women are higher than those of married women.
"We have shown that partnership and parenting histories are important influences on later life health and, in many cases, are as influential as the effects of a person's socio-economic status," Professor Gundy concludes. "Overall, these findings clearly have important implications for projections of the health status of the older population as well as contributing to our understanding of life course influences on health."
###
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Professor Emily Grundy on 0207 299 4668 or
Email: Emily.grundy@lshtm.ac.uk
Or Alexandra Saxon
NOTES FOR EDITORS
1. The research project 'Partnership and parenthood history and health in mid and later life' was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Professor Emily Grundy and Dr Cecilia Tomassini are based at the Centre for Population Studies, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 49-51 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP. Professor Mike Wadsworth and Ms Suzie Butterworth are from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development group at University College London and Professor John Henretta heads the Department of Sociology, University of Florida.
2. Methodology: In this study, researchers used data from three nationally representative longitudinal data sets, the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD) (Great Britain); the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS) (England & Wales) and the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) (USA). Researchers used a range of bivariate and multivariate methods in their analyses. The outcome measures they analysed included mortality (both overall and cause specific); general indicators of health status (such as self-rated health and limiting long-term illness) and a range of specific morbidities, including indicators of psychological health.
3. The ESRC is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It provides independent, high quality, relevant research to business, the public sector and Government. The ESRC total expenditure in 2005-06 was £135million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and research policy institutes. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
4. ESRC Society Today offers free access to a broad range of social science research and presents it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and saves users valuable time. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research (formerly accessible via the Regard website) and key online resources such as the Social Science Information Gateway and the UK Data Archive, non-ESRC resources are included, for example the Office for National Statistics. The portal provides access to early findings and research summaries, as well as full texts and original datasets through integrated search facilities. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
5. The ESRC confirms the quality of its funded research by evaluating research projects through a process of peer review. This research has been graded as 'good.'
Oublier Asimov ? La lente genèse des robots sensibles
Imaginez un monde idéal : vous avez mal à la tête et personne ne se met à passer l’aspirateur, vous souhaitez faire une petite sieste ou vous délecter de votre livre préféré et personne ne vient non plus à ce moment-là vous demander ce que vous voulez manger ce soir ou regarder à la télé. S’il est encore difficile d’accéder à ce genre de synchronisation heureuse dans le monde conjugal, ce ne devrait bientôt plus être le cas dans le monde de la robotique. En tous cas, c’est l’une des principales directions que s’est donnée Shuji Hashimoto, spécialiste international de l’intelligence artificielle, lors de la conférence sur les robots dotés d’intelligence sociale tenue la semaine dernière en Grande-Bretagne. Pour Hashimoto, les robots domestiques doivent être kansei, en japonais dans le texte. En gros, avoir un quotient émotionnel suffisant pour composer avec les affres des sentiments, de l’humeur, de l’intuition ou de la sensibilité nécessaires à une bonne interaction avec leurs maîtres. La solution ? Des capteurs sensoriels mesurant la pression artérielle, le taux de transpiration ou encore le pouls des humains, reliés à des systèmes de réseaux neuronaux chez le robot. Ainsi que la remise en question des « trois lois de la robotique » d’Asimov, qui imposent a priori une contrainte morale complexe aux robots. « Aussi longtemps que nous obéirons aux lois d’Asimov, nous ne pourrons avoir de machine qui soit un véritable partenaire pour l’homme », a déclaré Hashimoto.
***
Antisocial robots go to finishing school
19 September 2006 / Paul Marks
Imagine having your own humanoid robot. It is great at its job so your floors and windows are gleaming and spotless, but it has an annoying habit of vacuuming the living room when you have a headache, or offering you a meal just as you are drifting off to sleep on the sofa.
If you sometimes have difficulty reading other people's expressions and emotions, imagine how difficult it will be for silicon-brained robots. They will only ever be able to respond to us in an appropriate way if they can understand human moods.
What robots need is kansei. The Japanese term encompasses a raft of emotional notions, including feeling, mood, intuitiveness and sensibility. Without kansei, says Shuji Hashimoto, director of the humanoid robotics centre at Waseda University in Tokyo, the service robots being developed around the world will not be able to acquire the social skills they will need to get along with tetchy, emotional humans.
Last week Hashimoto told a conference on socially intelligent robots at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, that unless researchers start incorporating such emotional concepts into their robots' programming we will be interacting with some pretty insensitive brutes in our living rooms. "Emotion is one of the most crucial factors influencing the success or failure of communication between humans," he says. "Robots are going to need similar emotional capabilities if they are to cooperate smoothly and flexibly with humans in our residential environments."
Hashimoto sees emotive robotics engineering as an essential follow-up to the brute force of today's artificial-intelligence-based programming techniques, in which simple rules are applied to signals generated by a robot's sensors. For instance, when one of today's floor-crawling robotic vacuum cleaners senses it has reached the wall, its computer brain knows it is time to cut its motor and set a new course. Its AI simply pairs sensed situations with a set of pre-programmed actions.
Generating an appropriate response to someone's mood is a much more complicated task, so kansei-enabled robots will need to make use of sensors worn by their owner to spot signs of stress. These could include galvanic skin sensors that detect sweat by measuring the conductivity of the skin, and pulse monitors. Neural networks, which can interpret large amounts of data, will then be able to decide how best to react to the person. Hashimoto's hope is that in this way robots will at least appear capable of intuitive behaviour. So if a robot's owner is sweating and has a racing pulse, say, the robot will sense this and decide that now might not be the time to offer them the TV guide or tonight's dinner menu.
This is no pipe dream, says Elizabeth Croft, a robotics researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She says researchers are already using such physiological sensors alongside face and gesture recognition systems to study the emotional state of people when a robot is present. Her group has monitored how volunteers interact with a robot while they are wired-up with skin conductance, heart rate and facial muscle sensors (see "Sensors and sensibility"). They found that the very arrival of a robot can be enough to affect people. "The behaviour of the robot elicits a measurable physiological response from the user, such as surprise, calm, fear or interest. We can integrate this information into the robot's controller to allow the robot to respond in an appropriate manner," she says.
Hashimoto admits that even this level of complexity is merely technological play-acting. "Kansei robots will seem to understand human feeling to some extent and will appeal to us with their reactions. But they are not machines with a heart; they just look like they have a heart."
Faking it this way is not only philosophically unattractive to roboticists but also has a serious engineering downside: the more a robot attempts to cater for every conceivable human emotional state with appropriate reactions, the more complex its software becomes. This will ultimately make programming robots an immensely complex process, and render their software dangerously untestable.
One way around this programming nightmare, Hashimoto suggests, would be to let robots learn from their environment and construct their own sets of rules. This would force some robotics researchers to free themselves from the self-imposed shackles of the late Isaac Asimov's three "laws" of robotics. Coined in a 1942 short story called Runaround, these laws impose heavy constraints on a robot's software. Asimov's first law says that robots cannot harm a human or let a human come to any harm; the second says robots must always obey humans, unless that infringes the first law; and the third says robots must always protect themselves, unless that infringes the first or second laws. These rules demand enormous complexity from a robot's software, as every new situation must take them into account.
Instead of instilling this "moral framework" from the outset, Hashimoto thinks a robot's intelligence should grow as it ages, learning through trial and error much like a child goes from babyhood through to toddling and eventually to adolescence. "We have to design environments where human and robot learn together," Hashimoto says. Such a move would be controversial, placing robots in many ways on a par with humans. "But humans should not stand at the centre of everything. We need to establish a new relationship between human and machine."
Ditching Asimov would be a major wrench for robot makers, particularly those developing safety-critical domestic service robots, but Hashimoto is sticking to his guns: "As long as we obey Asimov's laws, we will never have a machine that is a true partner for a human," he says.
Sensors and sensibility
How do you measure a person's emotional reactions to robotic faux pas, such as invading personal space? Could robots be developed that can sense these feelings and react accordingly? These were the questions being asked at the socially intelligent robots conference in the UK last week at the University of Hertfordshire. Researchers are approaching the problem in a variety of ways, from analysing a person's body language as they interact with a robot, to detecting physical signs of stress.
BODY LANGUAGE SAYS IT ALL
Dana Kulic´ and Elizabeth Croft at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, want robots to respond to our body language. As a first step towards this, they are trying to find out how a robot's actions affect our mood and what kind of sensors a robot can make use of to suss out how we feel. The pair wired up 36 volunteers with various sensors, then used statistical analysis to work out which of a robotic arm's motions and activities made them feel calm, anxious or surprised. It seems that facial expressions are not a useful indicator of mood. More helpful would be to monitor the direction a person's head is facing or gazing in, as a droid will not have to worry so much about its actions if its owner's attention has wandered.
SIGNS OF FEAR
Until wireless sensing is perfected, one option for robot owners hoping to attune their droid to their mood might be to wear a lightweight armband sensor. Christine Lisetti's team at the Eurecom Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France, has been fitting volunteers with an armband capable of sensing up to six physiological and environmental parameters. The SenseWear armband measures galvanic skin response, heart rate, skin temperature, the rate at which heat is lost from the skin, and ambient temperature. After showing 29 volunteers a 45-minute slide show of emotive images and sounds, the researchers were able to determine sadness, anger, fear, surprise, frustration and amusement with varying but pretty high degrees of accuracy. Fear was recognised with 86 per cent accuracy, so robots will know when it's time to back off.
APPROACHING FUSSY OWNERS
Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, has been running tests with 1.3-metre-high robots (pictured) trundling around an apartment to see how volunteers react to their presence. "Imagine you have a robot assistant in your home 24/7. How should it approach you? How should it attract your attention? That's what we are investigating," she says.
Her group was surprised to find that people dislike it not only when robots approach them from behind, but also when they approach from the front. This reaction was more pronounced when people were sitting down. It also emerged that extroverts tolerate bad robot behaviour much better than introverts.
IMITATION GAMES
It is 2025 and you have just removed the bubble wrap from your new domestic robot. Now you need to teach it how best to serve you. Sylvain Calinon and Aude Billard at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland believe we should sit down opposite our domestic droid and play an imitation game with it. By strapping five motion sensors to each of their arms and making actions for a miniature humanoid robot to mimic, the pair trained the robot to make complex motions. This not only taught the robot to move in a more human-like way, but volunteers had so much fun that they wrongly told their droid it had made a mistake so they could keep playing.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 19 September 2006, page 28-29
Sélection des embryons prédisposés au cancer
Le diagnostic préimplantatoire (DPI) a été originellement développé comme alternative au diagnostic prénatal (DPN), afin de réduire les risques de transmission de troubles génétiques graves chez des couples fertiles. Le DPI consiste en un test d’anormalité génétique sur le matériel cellulaire prélevé à partir d’ovocytes ou d’embryons produits par FIV, à un stade très précoce de développement. Après le diagnostic, seuls les embryons sains sont sélectionnés pour leur implantation dans l’utérus, les autres étant détruits. La même technologie est aussi employée pour maximiser le succès d’une FIV chez des couples stériles, pour rechercher d’éventuelles aneuploïdies (nombre anormal de chromosomes - la plus connue étant la trisomie 21) communes ou liées à l’âge d’un ou des parents.
Depuis 1968, où le sexe d’un embryon de lapin a pour la première fois été déterminé avant son implantation, l’usage du DPI ne cesse de se développer et de diversifier chez les humains. Dernière application en date : la sélection d’embryons non porteurs de mutations prédisposant à certains cancers (colon et sein principalement). Bien sûr, cette technique est chère, invasive et douloureuse (surtout pour la femme). Et bien sûr, c’est aux Etats-Unis que cela se passe. En Europe, seule l’Angleterre autorise cet usage du DPI depuis peu. En France, on commence à en discuter, mais une fois qu’Axel Kahn aura fait le tour des télés pour hurler au retour de l’eugénisme et de la médecine de classe, la chose sera probablement entendue. Tous, pauvres et riches, noirs ou blancs, nous aurons le droit fondamental de transmettre nos tares et de tomber malade. Pour la plus grande gloire de la morale humano-humaniste.
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September 3, 2006
The DNA Age
Couples Cull Embryos to Halt Heritage of Cancer
By AMY HARMON
As Chad Kingsbury watches his daughter playing in the sandbox behind their suburban Chicago house, the thought that has flashed through his mind a million times in her two years of life comes again: Chloe will never be sick.
Not, at least, with the inherited form of colon cancer that has devastated his family, killing his mother, her father and her two brothers, and that he too may face because of a genetic mutation that makes him unusually susceptible.
By subjecting Chloe to a genetic test when she was an eight-cell embryo in a petri dish, Mr. Kingsbury and his wife, Colby, were able to determine that she did not harbor the defective gene. That was the reason they selected her, from among the other embryos they had conceived through elective in vitro fertilization, to implant in her mother’s uterus.
Prospective parents have been using the procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D., for more than a decade to screen for genes certain to cause childhood diseases that are severe and largely untreatable.
Now a growing number of couples like the Kingsburys are crossing a new threshold for parental intervention in the genetic makeup of their offspring: They are using P.G.D. to detect a predisposition to cancers that may or may not develop later in life, and are often treatable if they do.
For most parents who have used preimplantation diagnosis, the burden of playing God has been trumped by the near certainty that diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia will afflict the children who carry the genetic mutation that causes them. The procedure has also been used to avoid passing on Huntington’s disease, a severe neurological disease that typically does not surface until middle age but spares no one who carries the mutation that causes it.
Couples like the Kingsburys, by contrast, face an even more complex calibration. They must weigh whether their desire to prevent suffering that is not certain to occur justifies the conscious selection of an embryo and the implicit rejection of those that carry the defective gene.
As doctors and genetic counselors at leading cancer centers like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York start to suggest the possibility of P.G.D., more young patients are finding that their answer lies in trading natural conception for the degree of scientific control offered by the procedure. And if the growing interest in screening for cancer risk signals an expanded tolerance for genetic selection, geneticists and fertility experts say it may well be accompanied by the greater use of preimplantation diagnosis to select for characteristics that range from less serious diseases to purely matters of preference.
Already, it is possible to test embryos for an inherited form of deafness or a mild skin condition, or for a predisposition to arthritis or obesity. Some clinics test for gender. As scientists learn more about the genetic basis for inherited traits, and as people learn more about their genetic makeup, the embryo screening menu and its array of ethical dilemmas are only expected to grow.
“From a technology perspective we can test anything,” said Mark Hughes, director of the Genesis Genetics Institute in Detroit, who is performing P.G.D. this month for two couples who want to avoid passing on a susceptibility to breast cancer. “The issue becomes what is considered serious enough to warrant such testing and who decides that.”
The process is also difficult and expensive. P.G.D., which requires in vitro fertilization, can cost tens of thousands of dollars. While insurance companies often pay for the more traditional uses of the procedure, they have not done so for cancer-risk genes, fertility experts say. The barrier to affordability, some critics fear, could make preimplantation diagnosis for cancer risk the first significant step toward a genetic class divide in which the wealthy will become more genetically pure than the poor.
Knowing that Mr. Kingsbury had tested positive for the colon cancer mutation, the Kingsburys started with the basic laws of genetics: because children randomly inherit half of each parent’s genes, he had a 50 percent chance of passing it on. Since the mutation raises the risk of developing the cancer by about twentyfold, that means any child of theirs conceived the traditional way would have about a one in three chance of getting it, usually around age 45. Those who did develop the cancer would also have a nearly 90 percent chance of surviving it, but only if it was caught early.
The jumble of odds meant little to the Kingsburys as they tried to think about starting a family while the cancer claimed Mr. Kingsbury’s second uncle. Then, from a cousin of Mr. Kingsbury’s who had also fought colon cancer, they heard about P.G.D., the technology that offered them a way to reload the genetic dice.
To do it, they had to overcome their own misgivings about meddling with nature. They had to listen to the religious concerns of Mr. Kingsbury’s family and to the insistence of Ms. Kingsbury’s that the expense and physical demands of in vitro fertilization were not worth it, given that the couple could probably get pregnant without it. They had to stop asking themselves the unanswerable question of whether a cure would be found by the time their child grew up.
It took them two months to make the decision. But every time Mr. Kingsbury looks at Chloe, with her blue saucer eyes and her tantrums that turn abruptly to laughter — and back — he knows it was worth it.
“I couldn’t imagine them telling me my daughter has cancer,” he said, “when I could have stopped it.”
Shifting Medical Advice
Cancer-prone families are only just beginning to hear about P.G.D. in part because the procedure falls through the cracks in medicine. Oncologists tend not to think about family planning, and obstetricians tend not to think about cancer genetics. Doctors may also shy from raising the prospect of what some critics call “unnatural selection.”
For many couples, going to such lengths to ensure that a child will be born free of a predisposition to a certain kind of cancer is anathema. Breast and colon cancer, the two most common cancers for which genetic susceptibility tests are available, can be detected early and are often treatable, and even those who die of them often lead long and productive lives.
Many people without the risk-raising genes still get one of the cancers, and those who do carry the genetic mutations are just as likely as anyone else to develop other forms of the disease.
Prospective parents who want to avail themselves of P.G.D. must first undergo the same in vitro fertilization process often used to assist infertile couples, in which eggs are extracted from the mother and fertilized with the father’s sperm in a petri dish. When the resulting embryos are three days old, doctors remove a single cell from each and analyze its DNA. Only embryos without the defective gene are then considered candidates to implant in the mother’s uterus.
The out-of-pocket costs often exceed $25,000, depending on how many in vitro cycles are required. Because embryos are selected for their genetic status, rather than solely by which look the healthiest, the chance that they will fail to develop after implantation is higher. And despite the birth of thousands of apparently healthy babies after P.G.D., there is still concern that the long-term effects of removing a cell from an eight-cell embryo have not been studied enough.
That has not stemmed the rising demand to screen embryos for cancer-risk genes. No one tracks the number of such procedures in the United States, but an article in next month’s issue of The Journal of Clinical Oncology reports that clinics around the country have been quietly performing P.G.D. for hereditary cancers of the breast and the colon. The article, written by Dr. Kenneth Offit, chief of clinical genetics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, suggests there would be even more interest in P.G.D. if oncologists were to begin informing prospective patients of the option.
About one in every 200 Americans carry a genetic mutation that makes them more susceptible to breast or colon cancer. The half-million or so who carry mutations in several genes associated with colon cancer have up to a 70 percent chance of developing the disease, compared with 6 percent for those with normal copies of the genes. One in eight American women will develop breast cancer in their lifetimes, but for those who carry mutant forms of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, the risk jumps to one in two.
Until the last year or so, Dr. Offit said in an interview, he questioned the utility of P.G.D. for his patients, focusing instead on the increasingly effective prevention and treatment options for anyone born with an elevated cancer risk. Genetics, he said, is not necessarily destiny.
But learning of its existence, Dr. Offit noticed, could make many young patients less fatalistic about their genes and more optimistic about starting a family. The sense of relief it offered was especially strong among those who had seen a parent or a sibling die of cancer.
“Having seen so many children from cancer-prone families, I’m more sensitive to the sentiment that they would rather avoid the syndrome altogether,” Dr. Offit said. “Our genetic counselors now try to bring up the potential of this technology in circumstances where we think it may be empowering to young couples.”
Too Late for Some Carriers
If other cancer centers follow Sloan-Kettering’s lead, the shift will still come too late for some cancer gene carriers. One woman, a professional in New York, said she blamed bad medical advice for her having possibly passed to her 4-year-old daughter a chance of developing breast cancer this is five times as great as that of women in the general population.
Unaware of P.G.D., she followed the counsel given to most women with a family history of breast cancer and had her children before getting tested for the gene. The logic is that women ought not worry about their genetic status until they can consider the most effective prophylactic measures, removing their breasts and ovaries.
But in postings to an online breast cancer support group, facingourrisk.org, the woman said she suspected that the prevailing unease over genetic selection and the question of when life begins also kept doctors from suggesting P.G.D.
“Those values should not be dictating recommendations by doctors,” said the woman, 40, who declined to be identified by name because her words might be hurtful to her family. “That’s what I resent. I feel like the choice was taken away from me.”
In Europe, divergent values are quite explicitly shaping different P.G.D. policies. This spring, England approved the use of preimplantation diagnosis for the breast and colon cancer risk genes. In Italy, the procedure has been effectively banned for any condition.
In the United States, where the technology is not regulated, decisions about when it is appropriate are left largely to fertility specialists and their patients. Reflecting the growing demand for the procedure, the company that owns the tests for the breast cancer genes recently licensed the right to use them to three fertility centers.
“We decided we don’t want to do it here,” said William Hockett, a spokesman for the company, Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, citing both moral preferences and a disinclination to invest in the technique for business reasons. “But we don’t want to impose our values on society, so we felt we should allow others to do it if they wished.”
The interest in embryo testing is being driven largely by a greater knowledge of genetics among cancer patients and their family members. In the last five years, nearly 10 times as many Americans have been tested for the breast-cancer-risk genes as in the previous five, according to Myriad, surpassing a total of 100,000 since the test was made available in 1996.
Familiarity with their own genetic profile makes some people more comfortable with intervening to alter their children’s. For them, genetic traits can seem less like destiny and more like any other part of their lives that can be improved by technology.
Many of those exploring P.G.D. are the first generation of women to have reached reproductive age after their mothers developed cancer and tested positive for one of the breast cancer mutations. They see it as saving not just their children but generations of descendants from the same fate.
“I was very relieved to know that I would not have to pass this gene on to my children,” said Michaela Walsh, 20, a junior at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa., who found out she carries a BRCA mutation. She has already decided she wants to use P.G.D. when she has children. “My mother told me that the only worse thing than having cancer twice was having to give the gene to me.”
But the same knowledge makes others who carry the mutations take particular offense at the selection procedure, which they say implies that they themselves, and many members of their family, should never have existed. It raises the specter of eugenics, they say, in the most personal terms.
“It’s like children are admitted to a family only if they pass the test,” said Denise Toeckes, 32, a teacher who tested positive for a BRCA mutation. “It’s like, ‘If you have a gene, we don’t want you; if you have the potential to develop cancer, you can’t be in our family.’ ”
Other critics oppose preimplantation diagnosis on the grounds that it could be used to select against homosexuals, women or people with disabilities. It reduces people to their genes, they say, and paves the way for the pursuit of children designed to suit parental ideals and for discrimination against those born with perceived imperfections.
Proponents of the technology say that confusing the concept of “designer babies” with people trying to avoid deadly illnesses is hurtful and misleading. No one, they say, would endure the substantial physical and emotional difficulty posed by the process to make a baby with blue eyes and a wicked curveball. Still, the hostility couples have encountered from friends, family, colleagues and even medical professionals caused several of those interviewed for this article to request that their names be withheld.
One prospective father, a medical resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, said the Shady Grove Fertility Center, the local fertility clinic, required that he and his wife, also a resident at Hopkins, write a letter justifying their request for P.G.D. to the clinic’s ethics committee.
The doctor’s own father continually warned that in trying to prevent cancer, removing a cell from the embryo would create a mentally retarded child — no matter how many times his son cited studies to the contrary. Reactions from colleagues made the couple worry that if they allowed their names to be used, it might hurt their chances when applying for jobs at medical or research institutions.
“It became such a negative topic of conversation that my wife and I decided, ‘We’re not talking about this to anyone,’ ” said the doctor, 30, whose mother has had her breasts, uterus and ovaries removed to combat her cancer, in addition to undergoing dozens of chemotherapy sessions.
The couple held firm in their belief that there was no virtue in letting nature take its course when its outcome was so potentially damaging. “We hope to look back on this as really the first decision we made as parents,” they wrote in a letter to the ethics committee that persuaded the clinic to let them move ahead.
Multiplying Decisions
Even for those who choose it, the burden of selection weighs heavily. Kim Surkan, who carries the BRCA1 breast cancer mutation, said her partner had initially described preimplantation diagnosis as a “pact with the devil.” As Ms. Surkan prepares for her eggs to be extracted next month, she has nightmares that the child she selects will drown in a swimming pool, as opposed to a child chosen by fate, who might carry the cancer-risk gene but would have been a good swimmer.
“At least I know I’ve done whatever I can do with the information I have,” said Ms. Surkan, an adjunct lecturer in women’s studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I can’t control everything.”
Like many people who want to take advantage of P.G.D. but cannot easily afford it, Ms. Surkan had to first convince her insurance company that she was infertile so that it would pay for the in vitro fertilization process. Because she is in a same-sex couple, that meant she had to undergo several cycles of insemination, hoping that she would in fact not get pregnant, so that she could proceed with preimplantation diagnosis.
Now more decisions are coming. What if, she wonders, she is unlucky, and all her embryos have disease genes? Should she implant a male one, since men rarely develop breast cancer, even if she is opposed to selection based on gender?
If she does get pregnant with an embryo found to be free of the gene, should she test the fetus at 16 weeks, since there is up to a 3 percent chance that P.G.D. will fail to detect an unwanted mutation? If she has two embryos implanted, and one has the defective gene, should she terminate it?
For many couples, preimplantation diagnosis is an appealing option precisely because it does not require terminating a pregnancy, a step that is common after an amniocentesis reveals that a fetus has a severe genetic disease but is essentially unheard of for predisposition to common cancers.
Danielle Jamond, who carries a gene for a severe form of inherited colon cancer, said she and her husband were considering that option a year ago. But she was saved from making the choice when she heard of a doctor who had developed a P.G.D. procedure for her form of the disease.
“At that point, the choice was obvious,” said Ms. Jamond, a human resources manager in a suburb of Paris, who has had her large intestines removed to avoid getting the cancer, a prophylactic measure for people with her genetic mutation.
Four embryos were created from her 12 eggs, and three did not have the genetic mutation. One died, the other two were implanted, and one survived. She is now six months pregnant with the surviving one, a girl.
But some people who believe life begins with conception think P.G.D. is as unethical as abortion and perhaps more pernicious because it is psychologically less burdensome. Unused embryos may be frozen indefinitely, skirting one moral issue, but at a cost of several hundred dollars a year. Reproductive Genetics Institute, a leading P.G.D. lab in Chicago that performed the preimplantation diagnosis for the Kingsburys, said about half the embryos containing the unwanted genetic profile were discarded and half donated to research.
‘Is This Genetic Engineering?’
Already, thousands of couples who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to overcome infertility use P.G.D. to weed out embryos that harbor common chromosomal disorders that would otherwise be screened for by amniocentesis. Fertility experts say they may be the first to take advantage of the procedure for a range of other genetic conditions.
Dr. Ina N. Cholst, a reproductive endocrinologist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, said a fertility patient of hers who suffers from an inherited arthritic condition called ankylosing spondylitis was planning to add genetic diagnosis to her in vitro procedure. She has a 50 percent chance of passing the gene to a child. Of those who carry it, four of five will be unaffected. The others will have arthritis, sometimes mild and sometimes quite severe, but increasingly treatable.
“We brought it up,” said Dr. Cholst, who consulted with the patient’s rheumatologist. “At the same time, I am thinking, ‘Is this a wonderful thing, or is this genetic engineering?’ ”
In the future, many specialists believe, most in vitro fertilizations will be performed for fertile couples seeking genetic diagnosis, not as a treatment for infertility. But as it becomes easier to identify the possible consequences of more kinds of genes, the decisions for parents may become harder. Having passed over 4 embryos with the defective gene and identified 10 healthy ones, the Kingsburys were asked if they wanted to pay $2,000 extra to test them for Down syndrome. That test eliminated two more.
“You kind of feel like you shouldn’t be doing it,” Ms. Kingsbury said. “But then why would we go through all of this and not take those extra precautions?”
Soon, experts say, prospective parents may be able to choose between an embryo that could become a child with a lower risk of colon cancer who is likely to be fat, or one who is likely to be thin but has a slightly elevated risk of Alzheimer’s, or a boy likely to be short with low cholesterol but a significant risk of Parkinson’s, or a girl likely to be tall with a moderate risk of diabetes.
For the Kingsburys, the choice is still clear. Like any parents, they plan to tell Chloe the story of her birth. And if all goes well, they say, she will soon have a sibling who shares a similar tale.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company