Children: Do babies know the difference between right and wrong?

Yes they do, according to Paul Bloom at Yale University. David Derbyshire reports:

Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University in Connecticut, whose department has studied morality in babies for years, said: 'A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.

'With the help of well designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life.

'Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bones.'

What Dr. Bloom means to say, of course, is that morality is encoded in the genes and owes little or nothing to reason.

But other researchers are skeptical:

Dr Nadja Reissland, of Durham University, said babies started to learn the difference between good and bad from birth.

'Everything hinges on who decides what is normal,' she said. 'By saying pushing the ball up the hill is helpful, the researchers are making a moral judgement. The babies might just prefer to see things go up rather than down.

By “learn,” she means that the babies begin to apply concepts; Good vs.evil are not hardwired.

I think the most reasonable explanation of the experiments described is that babies prefer happy faces to sad or angry ones, etc., but good and evil are a bit more complex than that.

Evolutionary psychology: Pink for a girl, blue for a ... girl?

Philosopher Cordelia Fine, who wrote a book on the neuroscience and other studies of the differences between men's and women's brains - and found most of them flawed - pauses to target a classic in evolutionary psychology: Why girls prefer pink.

... psychologists and journalists now speculate on the genetic and evolutionary origins of gendered color preferences that are little more than fifty years old.

Little more than how many years old? Read on:

For example, a few years ago an article in an Australian newspaper discussed the origins of the pink princess phenomenon. After trotting out the ubiquitous anecdote about the mother who tried and failed to steer her young daughter away from the pink universe, the journalist writes that the mother's failure "suggests her daughter was perhaps genetically wired that way" and asks, "is there a pink princess gene that suddenly blossoms when little girls turn two?"

Just in case we mistake for a joke the idea that evolution might have weeded out toddlers uninterested in tiaras and pink tulle , te journalist then turns to prominent child psychologist Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg for further insight into the biological basis of princess mania: "The reason why girls like pink is that their brains are structured completely differently to boys," he sagely informs us. "Part of the brain that processes emotion and part of the brain that processes language is one and the same in girls but is completely different in boys ... "

- Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, p. 208.

Okay, but Dr. Carr-Gregg and other authorities are correct, the pace of evolution has been nothing short of catastrophic in recent decades. Formerly, blue was the colour for girls - and for boys?:

The preferred color to dress young boys in was pink! Blue was reserved for girls as it was considered the paler, more dainty of the two colors, and pink was thought to be the stronger (akin to red). It was not until WWII that the colors were reversed and pink was used for girls and blue for boys... -Dress Maker Magazine

Certainly, in Kate Greenaway's late 19th century illustrations, fashionable girls strut in blue.

Fine also informs us that the early 20th century saw a concerted move to use infant and toddler clothes to reinforce gender differences. But that requires consumer choice. Most children's clothing of long ago was pretty functional - swaddling clothes, smocks, et cetera, and cut down adult clothes. Few people could afford dyes of their choice.

So yes, it's evolution - a very recent evolution of ideas about gender, which might depart with no offspring.

See also: Neuroscience: Philosopher rips "drivel" - pop science media 's bread and butter

More fun from voodoo neuroscience:

Neuroscience and popular culture: Who do voodoo? They do! Social neuroscientists, that is:

Neuroscience shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys ... come to think of it, why does social neuroscience only tell us what we already heard from that high school drop-out cousin, shooting pool down in the rec room between his split shifts at the loading dock?

Is this really science? Probably not, say a team of statisticians, who took a look at some of these studies. Basically, many of the claimed correlations were simply too high to be possible. That was because the "social neuroscience" people were cherry picking the data."

Gender Genie: Fritz your wits about which sex you belong to?

Using an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, you can find out whether the genie thinks you are a man or a woman by submitting a sample of your writing.

Given that the genie works best on texts of more than 500 words, I have decided to submit my five most recent columns for ChristianWeek.

Neuroscience: Vive la difference between boys and girls?

What I find really interesting is the way people are always looking for confirmation of weird theories from neuroscience, but they won't accept actual evidence that disconfirms a weird theory. For exmaple, there is way more evidence that boys and girls are different than that weird materialist theories of religion are true.

Incidentally, none of these findings shows that girls can't excel in math and science. They help us understand why many girls do not TRY to excel in math and science. That's useful information, however we choose to use it.

Child mental health: Why progress is so slow

(My most recent column for ChristianWeek )

Last column (September 15, 2008) featured tips from psychology and neuroscience for doing the best possible job in schoolwork. The skinny: For normal levels of achievement, self-discipline and sleep matter far more than IQ.

But what about truly troubled kids? Kids with mental problems like anxiety, ADHD, disruptive behavior, or pervasive development disorders? Parents, pastors, and youth leaders might be interested to learn of a recent hard-hitting editorial in Nature Neuroscience (September 2008) highlighted a “Credibility crisis in pediatric psychiatry.” It is a warning that there are no simple, short-term answers to these problems on the horizon.

Briefly, the editors said, “Our understanding of the neurobiology and treatment of psychiatric illness in children remains poor. Prominent psychiatrists have now been accused of concealing the extent of their financial ties to the drug industry. We urgently need to encourage more science in this area and we need vigorous regulation to restore some neutrality to the field.” What’s behind that?

First, as the editors implied, it is often difficult to identify or treat childhood mental disorders. For one thing, children are always growing and changing, and learning to cope and relate—and they mature at their own pace. They may not be able to communicate clearly. And even if we are pretty sure about what is wrong, we don’t always know what to do about it. And by the time we develop an effective approach, the problem may have changed.

Here are some other problems they identify: Drugs are usually tested on adults, but the findings do not necessarily translate well to children. Their long term effects on brain development and function are not known. One research problem is that, whereas drugs for physical conditions can be tested on animals first, there are often no useful animal models for specifically human mental problems.

The issue that sparked the “credibility crisis” mentioned above was that psychiatrists who prescribe anti-psychotic drugs may have financial ties to the drug industry, in the form of, for example, consulting fees or ownership of shares. In one instance, Stanford University recently removed its chairman of psychiatry as a principal investigator of an antidepressant in a study paid for by the US National Institute of Mental Health. It determined that he had undisclosed ties to the drug company whose product was being investigated.

A subtler problem is this: Many drugs are prescribed for children off-label. But there is little incentive for the drug company to sponsor expensive large trials to determine whether they work for children. If studies show that a drug does not work, it should not be prescribed, but no useful substitute may be available.

Here is another problem: A scientifically based trial must have a placebo group—a group that thinks it is getting the medication, but actually isn’t. Here is the reason: A large proportion of the placebo group will get better, partly because the subjects believe they are receiving a treatment. These results must be subtracted from the results in the control group, to determine the difference the medication itself made, as opposed to the power of suggestion. Adult participants in a clinical trial are told up front that they might be randomly assigned to the placebo group. According to surveys, few subjects actually believe they are in the placebo group. But because they are informed adults and they gave consent, what they believe is beside the point. However, children cannot give valid consent to participate in a clinical trial. So the risk that many children are in the placebo group—and therefore may not be receiving a medication that could actually help them—is an ethical dilemma. It could become a legal dilemma too, if tragedy occurs.

For these and other reasons, there are few or no obvious solutions to child mental health problems. Many parents may echo the father in Mark 9:17-29, “ ... Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit ... I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not.” Knowing in advance that this will sound trite to some desperate parents, one must mind Jesus’s word (v29), “This kind can come out only by prayer.” The good news is that prayer does help, though we do not often see its results immediately, only in retrospect.

Neuroscience: No, we really DON'T understand kids

This editorial in Nature Neuroscience raises a key children's health issue issue:

Our understanding of the neurobiology and treatment of psychiatric illness in children remains poor. Prominent psychiatrists have now been accused of concealing the extent of their financial ties to the drug industry. We urgently need to encourage more science in this area and we need vigorous regulation to restore some neutrality to the field.

Here's a brief excerpt:

Diagnosing mental disorders can be tricky even under the best of circumstances. God biomarkers for psychiatric disorders (pediatric or adult) are nonexistent. Our knowledge of the neurobiology of these complex disorders also has glaring holes;

And if you are the parent of a child with a mental disorder, you can at least have the peace of mind of knowing that, if you think this :

... there is an urgent need to put more science behind child psychiatry. We need an independent, objective assessment of the efficacy and safety of these medications, comparing existing generics and new products, and comparing non-drug or combination interventions to drug-only approaches. One option is to pool money from both industry and the government or other funding bodies, bringing together public and private money to fund such studies (similar to the ‘Innovative Medicines Initiative’ proposed by the European Commission). The raw data generated by clinical trials should be available for independent scrutiny. We also need to consider ways to increase recruitment in clinical trials, such as an alternate trial design where all patients initially get access to active treatment (Klein, D.F. JAMA 299, 1063–1065 (2008)) . Urgent action is needed to restore some objectivity and neutrality to this field; the stakes are simply too high to remain complacent.

... you have expert company.

For some reason, Nature Neuroscience is not making this editorial "Credibility crisis in pediatric psychiatry" (Nat Neurosci. 2008 Sep;11(9):983.) available free online yet, but you mightbe able to read the rest through a library with journal subscriptions.

Science journalist notices that people are smarter than apes

I was, so to speak, "shocked" to read this story from Reuters:

Shock: kids smarter than chimps
by Will Dunham
September 07, 2007 09:22am
Article from: Reuters

IN another case of researchers reporting the bleeding obvious, European scientists have found that children are smarter than chimpanzees.

A unique study comparing the abilities of human toddlers to chimpanzees and orang-utans found that two-year-old children have social learning skills superior to the apes, the researchers said.
In one social learning test, a researcher showed the children and apes how to pop open a plastic tube to get food or a toy contained inside. The children observed and imitated the solution.

The apes, of course, tried to smash their way in.

I think I LIKE Will Dunham. He admits stuff that is true.