Square One

I thought I’d have you listen in on this IM conversation I had with a friend from medical school, Simon Adebola, about science, science illiteracy and biomedical science in Nigeria/Africa. Simon blogs at iInitiative.

Simon Adebola: So tell me, what is new in the nebulous world of cells transmitters and neurobiology?

Seye Abimbola: Nebulous world?

Simon Adebola: Just teasing. But wait, let’s see how well you can guard your territory. Imagine I thought it was nebulous and even went a bit further to say that science could be tricky and the analysis dodgy.

Seye Abimbola: …and you’d be perfectly right. That is indeed the true nature of science and the bravado and hubris of science in its more modern history is a loss and the way science has fed public imagination with promises of its powers is also unfortunate… That said, it is still the only way we know by which we can grasp the mysteries of  the natural world, hence the need for constant doubt and skepticism, from the makers and the consumers of science alike.

Simon Adebola: Wait a minute, you remind me of this Oxford Prof Jerome Ravetz. He wrote on post normal science, citing much of what you just stated above. It could be that much of what we call hard facts, especially in modern science is not as factual as we tend to want to make our journal editors, peers and larger public believe.

Seye Abimbola: Journal editors and peers are often conniving partners in the business… and unfortunately, the scientifically illiterate public and newspaper editors just take it in, and spread it… and it backfires some times, with the recent example of Climate Science. Climate science had an agenda and I am suspicious of any science with an agenda and unfortunately that is what much of science is today.

Simon Adebola: Well, all writing, I was taught, has an agenda, and that virtually spoilt films and entertainment for me because I then acquired a magnifying lens and sometimes it descends much lowers to an agenda for money. Science like religion has proven not to sit comfortably with the kind of scrutiny it has gotten. They both would rather prefer to be seen as being infallible and yet no enterprise with humans at the helm should be seen as such

Seye Abimbola: It is troubling how money and agenda drives a lot of research, including medical research and how unfortunately no one beyond the club is even able to really scrutinize. When I was at the BMJ (British Medical Journal) I had a different impression of how science worked. There was the image of science in its most perfect, ideal sense, and although it showed that there was a lot of crap science and studies going on, it didn’t quite ring home that it was a given in “the holy of holies of intellectual objectivity” (Wole Soyinka).

Simon Adebola: Being a strong believer in objectivity and experimentation (I find it truly fascinating) I wonder what the scientific community can do to regain its credibility.

Seye Abimbola: I don’t think it will happen unless we redefine our index of academic credit and the way science is funded – number of papers in peer reviewed journals is a bad idea and funding according to result – often number of papers or positive result – is killing science. It forces scientists to want to say something, when there isn’t anything to say, creates publication bias, unnecessary data analysis et cetera.

Simon Adebola: Sometimes it is like the case of a serially abused individual. Concurrently ignored and used by those they hoped would care about them – politicians and to a lesser extent industry. Over at Cuba (Forum 2009, Global Forum for Health Research) there was this palpable inferiority complex in the research community, a complex not devoid of pride, seemingly crying to be heard by policy makers. As they say in Yoruba, it is a thief who knows how to trace the footprints of another thief on a rock. Once the politicians/policy people see through the credibility flaws, they just would rather use, rather than trust the research community. What would you recommend to improve the assimilation of science into policy?

Seye Abimbola: There’s a lot that is wrong about how science is presently done and how it feeds into policy. I’ve been thinking a lot about policy these days…Ultimately what we need to do is improve scientific literacy. I wouldn’t mind suggesting a model that has scientists, not necessarily practicing, as policy makers in science/medicine…

Simon Adebola: …building a bridge sort of.

Seye Abimbola: Yes, because it’s so easy for scientists to stand on the other end of the divide and send in dumbed down, over-edited, information that lack the nuances, and the element of doubt that comes with science…I’m not happy about the example of Al Gore who has been the most public face for climate change for a long time…It would be a different scenario entirely if he is re-echoing what scientists in the field are saying to the public. However, scientists in the field are the ones trying to re-echo what he is saying by making their data agree.

Simon Adebola: No one is comfortable with the ‘everything is caused by climate change’ line. It gets rancid after a while, with science making the claim on both sides. Ten years ago, science predicted that due to climate change some parts of the world experience drops in snow, for example I heard they said British children would not know what snow was. Now science is proving to us that due to climate change, there would be fiercer snow storms. That breeds the reaction you get when you discover the movie you are watching does not have a plot you want to turn it off, but again you want to see if its plotlessness, is the ingenuity of the director in display, so you hang on watching, hoping it would eventually make sense, somehow.

Seye Abimbola: Again, this is because scientists are not committed to saying the truth the way it is…

Simon Adebola: …and that is the context in which post normal science explores its stance. “Post-Normal Science is a concept developed by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, attempting to characterise a methodology of inquiry that is appropriate for cases where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”. It is primarily seen in the context of the debate over global warming and other similar, long-term issues where we possess less information than we would like.” (Wikipedia)

Seye Abimbola: …and again it boils down to scientists feeling a need for that sort of misplaced recognition…

Simon Adebola: …true, opening them up to near destructive abuse. I guess each side just has to make peace with its roles. Oxford would never be Hollywood, or Washington DC, or the Super bowl. Hollywood with its fortune, sports with its fame, and Washington with its power wielding capabilities. The strength of science like you have said would continue to lie in its innovativeness and simplicity once other interests start driving it, that inferiority complex bites in, and self destruction could result. For now we observe the movie, hoping there is a plot. Those profiting off this, increase the hype, the noise, silence the naysayers and hope to bank as much as they can, such that win or lose, at least they have made enough to reward their efforts.

Seye Abimbola: I’m wondering what is there for science in Nigeria… There’s a lot that never happened, despite enormous early promise in Nigeria.

Simon Adebola: There is hope. New minds, fresh minds, need to be trained. We need a reorientation. Science as you know has flourished even when repressed. Galileo, Einstein. It is the commitment that we should hope does not dwindle. The value is in service that would drive a pursuit of excellence, creativity, and better ways of doing things…

Seye Abimbola: In medicine, if we look back to the days of Osuntokun et cetera, they somehow did not, and I suspect due to a lot happening on the political front in Nigeria, manage to build that critical mass that could help sustain scientific productivity. Those guys did and published a lot of great work, good, world class studies and it just didn’t trickle down the generations…and I’m wondering, what can we do? How do we ensure that fresh minds are trained?

Simon Adebola: I hope there can be mega research institutes that will represent a focus on excellent research, openness to innovation, and economically sustainable models where research and innovation lead to productivity and development. I also think scholarships and studentships focused on solving the actual needs in the continent are a crucial need – these should come first. It is just that the selfishness can be acute and sometimes crippling, but we can’t deny the need to keep building capacity.

Seye Abimbola: We are presently finishing up the Build AfReCa! (African Research Capacity) paper for the journal Science. Build AfReCa! Is a very young network of young scientists, mostly Africans in the Diaspora, mostly students trying to work towards improving research capacity in Africa…

Simon Adebola: We need more and more of that, aggressively driving knowledge growth.

Seye Abimbola: We put out a survey in the last quarter of last year to assess the needs of young scientists from Africa and why they might not work in Africa and what might make them want to work in Africa, and their general geographical spread. At this stage, it’s essentially advocacy, creating a voice, an image, some advocacy for the need for funding, coordinated funding for young scientists in sub-Saharan Africa, funded to do great work on the ground in Africa.

Simon Adebola: I think that is crucial and greater seriousness with African journals. We need the equivalent of The Lancet, BMJ and NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) on the continent…In fact one could talk to some of these journals to help grow stronger journals with greater visibility on the continent.

Seye Abimbola: We will need to work with the model like PLoS (Public Library of Science). It would be nice to have a PLoS Africa…. PLoS is absolutely open access, and online with a good Impact Factor…The tricky bit is that it will be online, but again, internet access in Africa is getting better by the day…so, that can be done.

Simon Adebola: …and daily digests can be sent by email or even SMS gateways alerting of papers of interest…

Seye Abimbola: …the first place to go when looking for good studies from Africa.

Simon Adebola: I am sure we can get funding for that…The Library is online, you register and select your interest. Each time a paper of interest to you appears, based on your selection, you get an SMS with basic info on the paper.

Seye Abimbola: The journal will need an editorial team, a peer reviewer bank, et cereta.

Simon Adebola: This is the kind of aid they should be interested in giving Africa, not more money for corrupt leaders…

Seye Abimbola: Good. Maybe we should put a proposal together…

Simon Adebola: I think we should…once we have the back end defined well, and teams in place… and even though it costs, we can start with donor funding and once we have a critical base of users, we can work on different models to make it work. This would make research awareness go up greatly…

Seye Abimbola:  Thanks. It’s been a great conversation, and I’m tempted to blog excerpts from the conversation on NT.org (Nigerians Talking Science – An IM Conversation).

Simon Adebola: Thanks. Please feel free to do that. It’s been a huge pleasure on my part.

I doubt that there’s any other scientist in history that has succeeded in gettting other scientists to make their case for them both in life and in death as much as Charles Darwin. Paul Ekman here explains the other side of Darwin’s theory and world view – altruism and compassion for all living beings, human and nonhuman – with a striking similarity to Bhuddist doctrine as discussed in “Darwin’s greatest unread book” The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. He quotes from the book:

 . . [E]xperience unfortunately shews [sic] us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. . . . This virtue [concern for lower animals], one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they extend to all sentient beings.

Paul Ekman continues:

During a series of discussions, I read this last Darwin quote to the Dalai Lama about emotions and compassion. The Dalai Lama’s translator exclaimed, “Did he use that phrase ‘all sentient beings’”? The translator was surprised because this phrase is the exact English translation of the Tibetan and Sanskrit description of the highest extension of compassion by a bodhisattva (a Buddhist saint). A concern for the welfare of all living beings is not found in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), which focus upon a concern for all human beings. A concern for other animals exists in only a limited fashion in Hinduism. Among the world’s major religions, embracing with compassion all living beings is unique to Buddhism.

The other way round now, again quoting from Darwin’s same book:

Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens showed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his own neck, inflicted on him whilst kneeling on the floor, by a fierce baboon. The little American monkey who was a warm friend of this keeper, lived in the same compartment, and was dreadfully afraid of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape, after . . . running great risk of his life.

The full text of the article is here.

It is itself a surprise to me that we are responding to the issue of the alleged Nigerian suicide bomber/terrorist as if it was totally unpredictable. We want to condemn it, we are disappointed by what Umar is alleged to have done and the added shame and disrepute that has brought upon Nigeria, but it would be wrong to suggest that there are no fundamentalist strains in Nigeria. They abound.

The recent Boko Haram incident, and the way muslims in Northern Nigeria reacted to the 2005 Danish cartoons of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) by setting churches on fire suggest that we must have been breeding this kind of people, and we are probably more capable of breeding them with possibly little outside influence than we presently imagine.

A series of troubling but interesting events happened in close succession, within the space of two years, when I was a student at Obafemi Awolowo University, (OAU) Ile-Ife. For those who are not very familiar with Nigeria, OAU is arguably the most Yoruba and also possibly the most politically active and intellectually progressive of Nigerian universities.

Obafemi Awolowo Hall (popularly called Awo Hall) is well known as the most politically active, hilarious, fun loving and liberal residential hall within the university. Awo Hall also has a long standing tradition, dating back about twenty years or more, of the free screening of pornography videos in the hall’s TV Room every Friday evening. There is incidentally a make shift mosque just across the lawn from the TV Room in what used to be the kitchen attached to a dinning cafe where students used to eat when the Nigerian government provided free food for university students. The tradition of Friday evening porn predates the existence of the make shift mosque, which according to the university was even an illegal creation in the first place. Suddenly one Friday evening the leaders of the Muslim group in the hall stormed into the TV room and seized the DVD player. The incident eventually degenerated into a free for all fight that resulted in a two-week university closure.

There was another occasion when a girl was beaten up for dressing “inappropriately” while visiting the hall (Awo is a male residential hall). The muslim brothers retreated into the mosque after the onslaught and they wouldn’t allow anyone who wasn’t a muslim to approach for questions and a demand of apopogy. They held sticks and other weapons, prepared to attack the uninvited. It was strange and scary. I had to step in, having been a rather good friend of the Awo Hall mosque as I had been spotted entring the mosque to take part in prayers, and having subsequently attracted a couple of the more senior members of the mosque who tried to convert me to Islam, albeit unsuccessfully. Thankfully, we were able to get them to apologise in the long run, an act that eventually that brought the mattter to rest.

A third one occured when a girl was married off to a fellow student by fellow students within one of Mosques in the university without the knowledge of either party’s parents. The girl subsequently decided to cut off all communication with her family. After several weeks of failed attempts at reaching her, the girl’s parents had to visit the university to confirm what had happened to their daughter. She had been transformed from a regular muslim lady to one that covers her face, she was already pregnant and she wasn’t going to see her parents when they eventually visited.

I once had a “friend,” a Nigerian who told me that he would kill me in the event of a holy war! He wasn’t joking.

Mild as these incidents were, what they show is that for these to happen in the liberal south, at the very bastion of southwestern Nigeria liberalism, you can imagine what possibly goes on in the north where some states already practice the Islamic Sharia legal system.

I don’t think that Umar did what he is alleged to have done simply because he is from a rich, privileged family or from northern Nigeria. He simply had good access to radicalising influences, or is it the other way round? There are thousands of Nigerians, I’m sure, who would go the same way if only they had the same kind of access Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had, and we should not be oblivious of this important fact as we discuss this unfortunate incident.

There is at least one sense in which Nigeria and the US are very similar: having a remarkably high proportion of religious people – or as the present fad expression goes, people that “have a personal relationship with God” – and of course also having a high proportion of creationists, which follows, so it seems, quite easily.

This was the first thought that occurred to me last year when during the heated US presidential campaign I saw John McCain and Barack Obama on the TV, apparently appealing to the American religious conservative right, both of them at the Saddleback Church, engaged in what could hardly pass for a mild debate moderated by the pastor, Rick Warren. I remember thinking to myself: the only other place where this could possibly happen is right here in Nigeria.

It is in my experience quite safe to assume that by being a Nigerian, you are simply religious by default, until confessed otherwise, and that you believe yourself to be a creationist even without having as much as a half-hearted look at the evidence for evolution by natural selection. With this premise, I have discovered what has become for me a most favoured pastime, which is to bring up the theory of evolution and Darwinism and related scientific concepts easily associated with atheism, agnosticism and all sorts of ungodly tendencies to spark up discussion amongst colleagues in Nigeria.

I hope we could have one such exchange here in the blogosphere on NigertansTalk. Painfully, competing and admittedly often more pressing issues generally trump whatever space we might have for science in our politics and national life in Nigeria.

In the discussions that have resulted, I have found that roughly half of the people I’ve encountered fall within the category I refer to, for the purpose of this post, as “the fundamentalist,” and the lowest watermark of such argument will be: “I would cease to believe in the existence of other planets and solar systems and galaxies if I find a remark in Bible (or the Qur’an) that so much as suggests that the earth is all there is in the universe.”

The other half are about equally divided into three groups: “the open minded” (”Well, it seems there is some good evidence that I’ll have to spend some time to consider more carefully.), the “I don’t give a damn” (“Whatever it is, I don’t think it matters.”), and “the malleable,” those that get convinced after a lot of discussion, only find that they have reverted to creationism at the next encounter (”What you said the other day, I really don’t think it can be true.”).

There is an American student from Texas here, with whom I’ve had two long and interesting discussions on evolution and creationism. She is an avowed creationist and a Christian, and like most of my Nigerian friends, she possibly couldn’t accept that being a Christian and an evolutionist at the same time are not fundamentally conflicting positions. For her, they are simply mutually exclusive: the exact same argument that my Nigerian friends would make.

It actually got me wondering how similar Nigerians must indeed be to Americans in this regard and why would that be? It is for me, as for most scientists a persistent puzzle as to why Americans are so religious and how creationism is so widespread and evolution is taken with so much negative seriousness in the US. I could easily explain the situation in Nigeria. I was never taught the theory of evolution in primary or secondary school, although of course more because there were no teachers to teach it than because there was a legislation against teaching it.

Looking back however, I think not having been taught evolution in secondary school was indeed a blessing because then I was left to study it all be myself and so had the opportunity to weight the evidence against my knowledge of the Biblical account of creation which I was raised in, and was, as I still am, also very well versed in. I am almost certain that even if there were teachers, it is unlikely that any will teach it well enough to present the evidence and allow the pupils make up their mind.

My comparative anatomy lecturer in medical school after discussing all the interesting and beautiful evidence for evolution, ended the lecture by saying it was all crap, and that we should take none of it any seriously beyond the point of recanting (sic) them during exams. Might that be the reason: the lack of unbiased exposure to the basic tenets of evolutionary theory? Might this be what some Americans are protecting against when they say they don’t want evolution taught in their schools?

What do you think? Are you an evolutionist? Why, if yes, and why not if not? Were you introduced to the theory of evolution by natural selection in secondary school? What do you think the effect of that might be if you were or might have been if you were not? Do you think an evolutionist could at the same time “have a personal relationship with God?” You are more than welcome to comment here or on NigeriansTalk.

Scott W. Wright writes in this week’s JAMA about his breast cancer, the feminization of the breast and why men should reclaim the breasts in order to combat the the stigma of male breast cancer. Here is an excerpt:

So I pose the question: Would we be better off if we returned to an age when men had breasts? Would that help men and physicians get beyond the stigma? In the time of Samson and Moses, when great men—heroic men—turned to beseech God, did they beat their chests? Did they flex their pecs? Of course not. To beg for mercy or wisdom or might, men of old beat their breasts. Home to a man’s heart. The bulwark to a man’s soul.

In Judaism, the Hoshen breastplate was a sacred garment reserved for the High Priest. For the fiercest warriors of the Roman Empire, the breastplate was the piece of armor that best symbolized a man’s willingness to march into mortal combat. Consider literature, when men would put pen to paper and seek to evoke the most compelling image of our gender’s strength and raw courage. What was it that Tarzan did to show that he was dominant over all other men and beasts? He beat his breasts. Far from being ashamed that he had breasts, Tarzan used them as calling cards to declare himself King of the Jungle. And, incidentally, he got the girl.

So there was a time—an age—when it was not only OK for men to have breasts, it was from within men’s breasts that great ideas and ideals sprang forth.

But over time something happened. The concept of a man having breasts gave way to a different sense of self. A changed view of what is masculine. We men at some point seem to have lost our breasts. They gave way to chests. Breasts became sexualized: Objects exclusive to the domain of women and girls. A real, modern man proves who he is by flexing the muscle in that manly chest of his. When things get a little rough, a man’s man no longer pulls inspiration from deep within his breast. The sources of valor and self-worth have apparently been moved to lower parts of the anatomy. A man must show he has guts. And make damn sure he’s never open to being accused of lacking, well, “testicular fortitude.”

The full article is here.

The Wall Street Journal commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question, “Where does Evolution Leave God?” Both knew that the other one was responding to the same commission but neither knew what the other was writing. It is interesting to see how each interprets the question: Armstrong was eager to rescue God from the claim of existence, substituting God’s existence for metaphor, while Dawkins, as usual argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do, and that anyone that claims God to be a metaphor is essentially an atheist. Here are my favourite paragraphs from each article. The full version is here.

Karen Armstrong: Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah (“parable”). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Richard Dawkins: The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.