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A lot of people are worried about the decline of science education in this country; it's hard to get through a policy discussion on employment, immigration, K-12, or universities without someone bringing up the STEM* fields and our need to attract more people to them in order to retain our natural competitive edge. As a buzzword, STEM is "synergy" 20 years ago. Everybody wants better focus on STEM.
You know what would be a good place to start? Science journalism that writes responsibly about science. Right now, at any given newspaper, the science desk is where you throw your worst investigative journalists, the ones you don't think can break any stories. You put them on the science desk, and they can read press releases from universities and find the ones that sound sexy and quippy and easy to reduce to a few column inches, and then you have them do that. They don't have to follow up on the research; they don't have to know the field. They don't even have to go to the occasional party, like the people on the social desk, or invent their own far-fetched trends like the lifestyle columnists. The science writers are effectively re-bloggers.
Case in point: the study which was re-blogged in both The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal this week (both articles paywalled right now, sorry) to the effect that women are less likely to give birth on Halloween than the days surrounding Halloween, and more likely to give birth on Valentine's Day than the days surrounding Valentine's Day. This is a science writer's wet dream. It's topical due to our proximity to Halloween, it sounds provocative without requiring us to change what we're doing, the numbers are easy to understand, and we're culturally obsessed with pregnant women at the moment. Slam Dunk.
Better yet, the researcher thinks this means pregnant women have more control than they think over when they go into labor, and have strong preferences for and against certain holidays, preferences of which they are totally unaware. (Raise hour hand if you prefer Valentine's Day to Halloween. Anybody?) You mean women have secret magical powers and should be held responsible for every random event in their pregnancy (in much the same way women can determine whether they'll die from cancer by how cheerful they are) AND women don't know what they really think? Science story of the year! Give this man a Nobel!
The problem: this researcher is an idiot who rushed to publication and theorized well beyond the data. He should be embarrassed. He looked at a set of numbers, saw a spike, and concluded that correlation equals causation. He didn't follow up by interviewing doctors, nurses, or the women who gave birth. He didn't think "hmmm, this goes against decades of research on human development, and maybe deserves a closer look." Nope. He decided: women are magic and love Valentine's Day.
If I had to generalize from this point of data and only this point of data, I'd probably say something like: Hmmm, the onset of spontaneous (as opposed to induced) labor begins when the fetus emits a chemical signal (we think surfactant protein A) into the mother's bloodstream, which makes the mother produce prosglandin. (To induce labor, we pretty much just give the mother prosglandin.) How fast these hormones take effect are mitigated somewhat by the mother's metabolic state, analogous to the way alcohol hits you faster or slower depending how recently you've eaten.
One of the things we know hastens the progress of labor is a rush of oxytocin, which reinforces prosglandin. Oxytocin would be released if a woman's partner played with her nipples or brought her to orgasm; given the romantic nature of the Valentine's Day holiday, I imagine even extremely pregnant women are engaging in sexual activity they might otherwise forego (and are possibly doing it earlier in the day), which might cause enough of them to progress to the third stage of labor (delivery) faster than they might otherwise.
Meanwhile, women are much more likely to go into labor when they are relaxed and resting, which is why women are more likely to go into labor overnight.** Halloween is a holiday on which people stay up late, walking with children to collect candy, or watch stressful scary movies. All of which could delay a labor just long enough to push a few people to November 1. If you looked at New Year's Eve, I bet you'd see the same thing.
Or maybe, you know, women are magic and secretly love the idea of having a kid on Valentine's Day, since there's nothing more romantic and partner-bonding than buying chocolates and jewelry and flowers for your five-year-old's birthday party, and maybe all the women who desperately hope they'll go into labor on one day but instead have to be induced are wrong about what they want or aren't trying hard enough. (Probably they are bad mothers and/or frigid and withholding.) It could be that. It could be that extraordinary claims don't require extraordinary evidence. I can see how I'd get that backward.
* Science, Technology, Engineering, Math
** Once you're in labor, it's a different story and moving around makes things move faster, which is why women at risk of extremely premature delivery are often put on bed rest. But as to the countless testimonials on pregnancy websites from women who "brought on their own labor" by walking around the high school track with their best girlfriends for five hours . . . sorry, ladies. The science does not bear this out; it jibes neither with the statistics nor what we know about the biological mechanisms. It's great that it made you feel active instead of helpless, and that you had this moment of community. It sounds beautiful and like something I would enjoy. It probably delayed your labor, if it had any effect at all. You think it didn't because you have no control group and you walked and then had a baby, and it was more memorable than the times you walked and didn't have a baby, or didn't walk and didn't have a baby. You are - wait for it - another layperson concluding correlation is causation.
You know what would be a good place to start? Science journalism that writes responsibly about science. Right now, at any given newspaper, the science desk is where you throw your worst investigative journalists, the ones you don't think can break any stories. You put them on the science desk, and they can read press releases from universities and find the ones that sound sexy and quippy and easy to reduce to a few column inches, and then you have them do that. They don't have to follow up on the research; they don't have to know the field. They don't even have to go to the occasional party, like the people on the social desk, or invent their own far-fetched trends like the lifestyle columnists. The science writers are effectively re-bloggers.
Case in point: the study which was re-blogged in both The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal this week (both articles paywalled right now, sorry) to the effect that women are less likely to give birth on Halloween than the days surrounding Halloween, and more likely to give birth on Valentine's Day than the days surrounding Valentine's Day. This is a science writer's wet dream. It's topical due to our proximity to Halloween, it sounds provocative without requiring us to change what we're doing, the numbers are easy to understand, and we're culturally obsessed with pregnant women at the moment. Slam Dunk.
Better yet, the researcher thinks this means pregnant women have more control than they think over when they go into labor, and have strong preferences for and against certain holidays, preferences of which they are totally unaware. (Raise hour hand if you prefer Valentine's Day to Halloween. Anybody?) You mean women have secret magical powers and should be held responsible for every random event in their pregnancy (in much the same way women can determine whether they'll die from cancer by how cheerful they are) AND women don't know what they really think? Science story of the year! Give this man a Nobel!
The problem: this researcher is an idiot who rushed to publication and theorized well beyond the data. He should be embarrassed. He looked at a set of numbers, saw a spike, and concluded that correlation equals causation. He didn't follow up by interviewing doctors, nurses, or the women who gave birth. He didn't think "hmmm, this goes against decades of research on human development, and maybe deserves a closer look." Nope. He decided: women are magic and love Valentine's Day.
If I had to generalize from this point of data and only this point of data, I'd probably say something like: Hmmm, the onset of spontaneous (as opposed to induced) labor begins when the fetus emits a chemical signal (we think surfactant protein A) into the mother's bloodstream, which makes the mother produce prosglandin. (To induce labor, we pretty much just give the mother prosglandin.) How fast these hormones take effect are mitigated somewhat by the mother's metabolic state, analogous to the way alcohol hits you faster or slower depending how recently you've eaten.
One of the things we know hastens the progress of labor is a rush of oxytocin, which reinforces prosglandin. Oxytocin would be released if a woman's partner played with her nipples or brought her to orgasm; given the romantic nature of the Valentine's Day holiday, I imagine even extremely pregnant women are engaging in sexual activity they might otherwise forego (and are possibly doing it earlier in the day), which might cause enough of them to progress to the third stage of labor (delivery) faster than they might otherwise.
Meanwhile, women are much more likely to go into labor when they are relaxed and resting, which is why women are more likely to go into labor overnight.** Halloween is a holiday on which people stay up late, walking with children to collect candy, or watch stressful scary movies. All of which could delay a labor just long enough to push a few people to November 1. If you looked at New Year's Eve, I bet you'd see the same thing.
Or maybe, you know, women are magic and secretly love the idea of having a kid on Valentine's Day, since there's nothing more romantic and partner-bonding than buying chocolates and jewelry and flowers for your five-year-old's birthday party, and maybe all the women who desperately hope they'll go into labor on one day but instead have to be induced are wrong about what they want or aren't trying hard enough. (Probably they are bad mothers and/or frigid and withholding.) It could be that. It could be that extraordinary claims don't require extraordinary evidence. I can see how I'd get that backward.
* Science, Technology, Engineering, Math
** Once you're in labor, it's a different story and moving around makes things move faster, which is why women at risk of extremely premature delivery are often put on bed rest. But as to the countless testimonials on pregnancy websites from women who "brought on their own labor" by walking around the high school track with their best girlfriends for five hours . . . sorry, ladies. The science does not bear this out; it jibes neither with the statistics nor what we know about the biological mechanisms. It's great that it made you feel active instead of helpless, and that you had this moment of community. It sounds beautiful and like something I would enjoy. It probably delayed your labor, if it had any effect at all. You think it didn't because you have no control group and you walked and then had a baby, and it was more memorable than the times you walked and didn't have a baby, or didn't walk and didn't have a baby. You are - wait for it - another layperson concluding correlation is causation.
