Science journalist Asya Kazantseva about GMOs, abortions and false science
Despite the fact that we live in the XXI century, attitude to scientific achievements in everyday life is sometimes as if centuries-old progress was not at all. Nevertheless, popular science journalism, which is trying to educate people and fight pseudoscientific ideas, is on the rise. Asya Kazantseva is one of her most prominent representatives in Russia. Two years ago, the first and incredibly successful book “Who would have thought! How the brain makes us do stupid things” was published by Corpus, for which last year she received the most prestigious Russian award in the field of popular science literature “Educator”. We talked with Asya about the state of scientific support in Russia, about why it is needed and how far progress has gone.
I wanted to be a doctor and studied in chemical and biological medical school, with practice in hospitals. Once at the autopsy in the morgue, I fainted and decided that it was not suitable for medicine. To check this, after school I worked as a nurse at the neurosurgical department and there I realized that I was really sick when living people had their brains sticking out of their heads, and moreover, I became attached to them and they died. I went to the biofak, because there are the same exams as in honey, and besides, I really liked the building of the Twelve Collegiums. They wanted to transport the faculty to Peterhof, but, according to legend, the management refused because of the huge Pacific crab, which could not be removed from the museum of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology. In real science, there is a very large distance between action and result, and I realized that a scientist would not leave me either - I lack abstract thinking. I was very unhappy, because I didn’t understand at all what I would be when I grew up. At that time, I had a LiveJournal, where I told different stories from the biological faculty, because it’s still very interesting and the biological faculty, in principle, a very good general education for a person. It quickly became clear that people respond very well to these stories.
When I was in the third year, I was accidentally found by the chief editor of the Progress program, where I went to work after the university. My duties were to impress the scientists. In 2008, we didn’t have a new science journalism: during the 90s, it died out, and when we called the scientists, we were told that they hated journalists and hung up. I had to read a dozen articles of the right person and confuse him with a question about nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate from the very beginning. After which he penetrated and agreed to talk. In general, with the program "Progress" we did a lot of cool things, struggled with pseudoscience and, for example, removed the first story in Russia that genetically modified products are good.
There is a VTsIOM poll, which shows that about 32% of people believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, 29% - that we lived simultaneously with dinosaurs, 46% - that antibiotics help from viruses as well as from bacteria. This is a problem and it shows that there is a huge gap between scientific knowledge and public perception of it. This not only puts a person in a stupid position, but also can harm his health, and also hinders the development of technology and the economy, because fears from society penetrate politics. Popular science journalism is struggling with this.
Knowledge, on the one hand, allows us to see everyday events in a new way, and, on the other, it helps to impress people. Intellect is very attractive, it is the main line of human evolution, our analogue of the peacock tail. There is an experiment in which people wrote an essay, say, on the topic "How I spent the summer." The results varied depending on whose photo they were shown before: a young woman or an elderly one. In the first case, many long beautiful words immediately appeared in the text. So, instinctively, we impress potential sexual partners. Intellect is correlated with the so-called quality of genes: if you are smart, then, most likely, also healthy, beautiful, and so on. Sense of humor, by the way, is also a sign of intelligence.
One of the most important findings of modern neurophysiology: if you can’t do anything, bite your wand
My first book was about evolution, although its title is not obvious. Everything weird and irrational that we do regularly, most likely, was beneficial in some conditions and therefore was evolutionarily fixed. I decided to write it because I had an unhappy love. First, I wanted to understand why we behave like fools, and secondly, to impress him - all the same peacock tail. This is well illustrated by the experiment of the Japanese scientist Masatoshi Tanaka. He took two groups of rats, which he shocked. Some could not do anything, and the second could gnaw a wooden stick. Those who could nibble felt much better after the current, they had less stress hormones. This is one of the most important conclusions of modern neurophysiology: if you can’t do anything, bite your wand. Do what you want if you think it helps you to get around the trouble. So if you have unhappy love, you need to convince yourself that when you write a book, everything will be fine. Because even if he does not return, at least you will stay with the book.
If science and scientific arguments come into fashion, then this is most likely the result of the environment in which the person grew up, and in part this is the merit of the new scientific journalism. There are people who may object to those who believe in homeopathy and are afraid of GMOs. If ten years ago everyone was horrified by an enthusiastic chorus, now there is always one person who explains that the danger of GMOs is exaggerated and will give a link to a popular science article. I am writing exactly such a book now, “Someone is wrong on the Internet,” about what research says about various controversial issues: GMOs, homeopathy, vaccinations, gays, about everything that makes spears on the Internet. Its goal is to provide people with scientific arguments when they are overcome on the Internet, and at the same time show where these arguments come from and how other sources can be found. It's great when people prove their point of view with the help of science, if only because it is difficult to prove an absolutely unscientific point of view with the help of science.
One of the most harmful antiscientific misconceptions is hysteria about GMOs and the anti-vaccination movement, since it takes many lives. This is a horrifying story: the former doctor Andrew Wakefield wrote a work on the falsified data on 12 children, because of this nonsense, the level of vaccination in England has drastically decreased. As a result, there were several outbreaks of measles, because of which people died. Vaccines are very dangerous for health, it is still a big problem in the world. Homeopathy is not the most dangerous of pseudoscience, it just sucks money from people for a placebo and treats only what passes and so on. A homeopath may well help someone, but their medicine is porridge from an ax; they do not help at the expense of white balls, but because they also prescribe diet, exercise and vitamins.
Just to convince people - it is rather a rarity. This is always a Gaussian: on one side there are convinced, for example, creationists, on the other are biologists, and in the middle there is a large fluctuating mass, for which this question is not the most important in life. They are ready to believe any internally consistent opinion that comes from an authoritative source. The task of education is not to persuade the convinced, but to lure the undecided to their side. This is what we must do, because our cause is right.
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Lecture of Asya Kazantseva "The brain of a man and the brain of a woman: are there any differences?"
There are many factors of innate inequality, and gender is only one of them. In the final analysis, it is necessary to evaluate a person not by what he achieved in absolute figures, but by what path he traveled. Our society is not ideal, but it still has social elevators. We are always looking for a compromise between who we could be and who we are. Indeed, there are some things in which men are on average statistically different from women, the same muscular strength that is associated with testosterone. But no matter what factor we may say, this is still an overlapping gaussian.
There are men who are stronger, women are weaker, but mostly they are people whose everything depends only on training, and not on gender. With intelligence even more interesting. Yes, it seems that geniuses among men are more, but the fact is that most stupid people are men too. Gaussians of different shapes are obtained: women are narrower - women are closer to the middle, - and men have a greater diversity of the population. There was a study that looked at the results of school tests of 72,000 teenagers, and in 0.1 percent of the smartest and most stupid boys prevailed. We can find differences between men and women, but at the same time the individual variation between people is much higher and more significant.
There are universal ideas about beauty from the point of view of biology. For example, facial symmetry seems attractive because asymmetry is a sign of health problems. We like young women who look like young ones with big eyes; since they are young, they can have many children. The smell is interesting: we think that the smell of the sweat of those people with whom we could potentially have healthier children seems more attractive. On the surface of every cell in our body, there are proteins of the major histocompatibility complex that recognize a potential danger for the immune system. For each person, they are different and affect the individual smell. It has been proven that the most attractive smell of those whose set of such proteins is most different from ours seems to us, because the offspring with such a person will have a wide range of immune responses.
To give an answer to the idea that thinness is a sign of health, you need to open the website of the world health organization and find the body mass index. WHO says that from 18 to 25 is the norm and there are no threats to health, while the idea of beauty corresponds to its lower boundary. Thickness stereotypes are unstable and change pretty quickly. There are observations that link them to the general degree of starvation of the population. When food is plenty and it is cheap, it is difficult to be slim and slender seem more beautiful. If there is little food available and it is difficult to get it, then it means that fat people have more access to resources and then they seem more beautiful.
The fact that we are in many ways a set of biological reactions is very good news. It is much simpler and more pleasant to live when you understand at least in general terms the mechanics that control you. You understand that during ICP you are sobbing not because something objectively bad has happened, but because you have ICP. Understanding that our brain is the fruit of biological evolution, which never reaches perfection, greatly simplifies life, allows us not to demand perfection from ourselves or from those around us. You understand that people can act irrationally, it allows them to be kinder to them. In this case, no one understands everything. I understand two times more than the average man in the street, but two times less than a professional biologist; there is still a huge pile of what no one understands. The scientific method is not a panacea, but it is the best way that we have to get closer to the truth.
The opinion of the embryo does not need to be considered, because it has no opinion
If it were not for this story with the "Dynasty", announced by a foreign agent, I could say that in general, scientific journalism is developing well with us. It should be understood that in this case we are talking about the trend, and not about absolute numbers. Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," a world bestseller, came out with a circulation of 10 million copies, which is terribly cool until we divide this figure by the number of the planet; the same story with Markov's book "The Evolution of Man." Audience naupopa in Moscow - a few tens of thousands of people. But the fact that there is room for improvement is good news. For those interested now in any book there is a huge selection of popular science literature. If you are not sure what to read, the easiest way is to focus on the icon of the Dynasty Foundation on the cover, they are at the origin of the popularization of science in our country. In addition, there is the award "Educator", whose long and especially short lists are noteworthy, as well as the site elementy.ru.
A wild story is happening right now: the Ministry of Justice has utterly groundlessly declared the Dynasty Foundation as a foreign agent. This makes it virtually impossible, for example, to work Dynasty with budget organizations, support schools, or hold scientific festivals at universities. On June 8, the foundation will announce that it is going to do about it - there are fears that it will decide to spit and close completely. It will be an irreparable loss for the country.
If you have basic school ideas about chemistry, then you understand that chemistry is all that surrounds us. In any apple, there are more chemical compounds than in medicine, where it is one specific. From ignorance, people are afraid of not those things that well illustrate the favorable attitude towards selection, and not genetic modification. Breeding is not like in “Dunno in a sunny city” when they plant seeds of sweet watermelon. For more than a hundred years, selection has been done, for example, with the help of radiation or chemical mutagenesis, when these seeds are irradiated with radiation. It turns out 1000 ugly mutants with broken genes, one of which has the properties you need (with hundreds of other unknown properties). Genetic modification is a more modern method of working with a specific gene, which can be followed. Simply put, breeding is working with the genome with a sledgehammer, and genetic modification is with nail scissors.
Now there are fundamentally new approaches to editing the genome, with unprecedented accuracy and specificity. This is the next stage of evolution after genetic modification, which opens up stunning perspectives in various areas. In the summer, there was a work about how it blocks HIV in those cells where it has got, and prevents infection of new ones. CRISPR technology allows you to very accurately edit the genome of different creatures in an arbitrarily chosen location. No one expected this to happen so quickly, so that new ethical problems arose. Modern society turned on reinsurance, which is good - a sign of progress. I think that CRISPR technology is likely to do without sacrifices, and its benefits will be enormous.
Most likely we will come to the "ideal children" in the foreseeable future. Even now there are preimplantation gene diagnostics, when during IVF you can take several embryos, look at their genes and put only those that you are sure of into the womb. While it is limited by law and we do not have the right to choose the sex of the child without medical indications, but this will change. We are still the heirs of a medieval reproductive strategy, when we gave birth as much as we could. It seems to me that when humanity gets used to the fact that people give birth to one child, they will be more serious about their only chance. People will need to choose its qualities, so that the child must be smart and healthy.
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Small ears, big eyes and a round head? It reminds someone
I do not agree that having children is not a personal choice, you need to strive for maximum awareness. On the one hand, women are subjected to social pressure, on the other hand, we are predisposed to us to like young children. Evolutionarily it is beneficial: if you are a small child, your chances of survival are much higher if you cause affection. This is called the “baby scheme”, the baby scheme is a kind of creature with a big head, big eyes, small ears, a small nose. There are tomographic studies showing that people have a pleasure center in the brain when they are shown a photo of such a creature, and the more hypertrophic the image, the stronger this reaction.
As for abortion, I think there is no special subject for discussion here. The opinion of the embryo does not need to be taken into account, because it has no opinion. The embryo does not hurt: until the 12th week it does not have a neurostructure that would allow it to experience any unpleasant sensations. The film "Silent Scream" - this is certainly a falsification. There are purely reflex movements that do not differ from the movements of the tadpole, but if they are correctly taken and cut into frames, then, of course, you can pretend that the unfortunate embryo is moving away from the scalpel.
The harm of abortion for the psyche, as studies show, depends on cultural attitudes. If a woman thinks that abortion is murder, then she will have post-traumatic stress disorder. If she does not think so, then there will be no problems. It is necessary to take into account the benefit of women and families, and the child who could be born. There are 7 billion of us, and it seems to me that you need to have children only when it brings you pleasure and you are sure that the child will have a good childhood.
The photo: Lyuba Kozorezova