Yesterday I reported on a paper by Hawass et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association claiming that the death of King Tut may have been due to a combination of inbreeding and malaria. A piece by Declan Butler in yesterday’s Nature News, however, reports several experts questioning this conclusion, and it’s only fair that I give space to the counterclaims. Here are the issues:
Is this the first demonstration of malaria in ancient Egypt? According to Butler’s experts, mummies older than Tut’s have previously shown evidence of infection by Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Butler adds that genetic evidence—presumably of the age-of-origin of anti-malarial alleles like sickle-cell hemoglobin—suggests that malaria was a problem well before Tut’s time.
Did Tut have bone disease? Butler’s experts say there are other explanations for Tut’s malformed feet, including malaria itself or even the embalming process: “burning or crushing [of the feet] by embalming salts or bitumen.”
But what about the canes in his tomb? Gino Forniciari, director of paleopathology at the University of Pisa says that canes were commonly used in ancient Egypt as “a symbol of power.” Well, maybe, but did the tombs of other kings have 130 canes, too?
So what killed him? I noted yesterday that it’s a bit dicey to claim that either malaria, bone disease, or their combination was the actual cause of Tut’s death. Albert Zink, one of the authors of the Tut paper, agrees. But he does argue that the bone necrosis occurred before Tut’s death, as there was evidence of healing before death.
Is the genetics o.k.? There’s some dissent here. Declan notes that “most researchers agree that the details [about Tut’s family tree] do not allow for a full assessment.” One red flag is this: “Eric Willerslev, an expert in ancient DNA at The University of Copenhagen and co-author on a paper published last week in Nature reporting the oldest human genome sequences so far, says he’s not convinced by the fingerprinting data.” That’s worrisome, because few reputable scientists would go public with such a claim unless the data were pretty unconvincing. The onus is on Hawass et al. to provide all of their data.
The upshot: as most of us know already, you can’t always trust published papers, even those appearing in reputable journals, to be free from flaws or, especially, exaggeration. Although some say it’s not the job of science journalists to find and highlight problems with an already-published paper, I strongly disagree. Any science journalist who is more than a hack should interpret new findings for her reader, and that means not only describing the results in language a layperson can understand, but also explaining why a study is important. And to do that, you need to take on board more than the author’s claims or their hype; you need to canvass other experts in the field for their reaction to the paper.
That’s precisely what Declan Butler did. A side benefit of all this is that is shows the public when there is still active controversy about an issue.
I’ll try as often as I can to draw attention to problems with or dissent about published work, but I have a day job and can’t always do this. But do see the comment by Occam on yesterday’s post (#10). He also finds problems with the Hawass et al. paper.
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Butler, D. 2010. King Tut’s death explained? Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.75
I suspect we can’t exactly compare cane counts considering we have no other comparable tomb. Wall paintings can be compared, bodies also since the ancient authorities rescued and stashed them elsewhere, movable objects with valuable ornamentation were long ago looted.
My oh my. No wonder our ancestors did not live very long. They say that King Tut was an inbreed. When you have children with siblings, cousins or parents you are mixing “like blood” so there is no way good genes can stamp out bad genes. This is because they are all the “same gene”. So if one parent had heart disease risks and the other parent had the same it will be 100% likely that there offspring will suffer the same fact.
Well there you go then. That is the basis for homeopathy. Just dilute the blood down by 10 to the 100th and the bad gene will be all fixed!
/sarcasm
Not quite right; although the likelihood of expressing recessive traits increases, there is not necessarily a guarantee of the expression – unless of course you explicitly bred for that (and even then it could be more complex).
Does anybody else have trouble with the name similarity between Nature News and Natural News? For about half a second, I was like, “Oh my god, Jerry Coyne has been suckered in by Mike Adams!” heh…
Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” is all about the role of science (and other) journalists and about being skeptical of all published papers (and non-published too). He emphasizes that people should ignore the summary section of papers and look at the data and methodology on one’s own to arrive at conclusions that may differ from the authors’
And you know, even people who are not scientifically-minded can learn to do that with practice. I was recently very impressed with my wife, who had been a little concerned about our use of a white noise generator to help our son sleep, since she had heard about studies suggesting it could have a negative neurological effect — but then she decided to actually seek out what those studies really said, and determined that what evidence exists was either not compelling or inapplicable. (e.g. rats exposed to extremely loud white noise 24/7 is not comparable to a human infant exposed to relatively quiet white noise for a few hours a day)
My wife has no science background whatsoever beyond 8th grade biology, so in some ways it is very encouraging that she was able to locate these papers and decipher them enough to recognize what they were really saying. On the other hand, my wife is also naturally very good at critical thinking, so maybe we shouldn’t get our hopes up too much about the average person… :/
The problem with the average person is not with their ability for critical thinking, but with their willingness to attempt critical thinking while keeping an open mind.
newenglandbob wrote:
The problem with the average person is not with their ability for critical thinking, but with their willingness to attempt critical thinking while keeping an open mind.
That’s exactly right. And the other part of that willingness is the will to do the hard work involved. For a person with a low level of education, (myself, for instance), it is not easy to puzzle one’s way through a genuine scientific paper. The woman mentioned above had a strong motivation for doing so, but just the same, she should be commended not only for her critical thinking skills, but for her willingness to make the major effort that was involved.
As painful as it is for me to defend Mooney… In the blog post you linked to, I do not think Mooney was saying that science journalists shouldn’t cry bullshit on a problematic peer-reviewed paper — but rather, I think he was saying that we can’t rely on science journalists to vet papers that have been subject to peer review before blabbing all about them in the media.
Mooney’s being pretty reasonable in that particular post, IMO. Of course, he doesn’t actually offer anything remotely resembling a solution… which is fine in and of itself, this is a hard problem and I certainly don’t have a solution to it either. I just wish he wouldn’t go around talking about what a bad job scientists are doing and how if only they’d listen to him — when he’s as clueless as the rest of us as to how to really improve science communication.
O.T. but I just listened to Mooney’s 1st P.O.I. interview, expecting crap, but was mightily impressed.
Are you sure he is dead?
OMGs: Rod Dreher is advertising for a webmaster for the new Templeton Foundation online magazine he will edit: http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/02/want-to-work-with-me-at-templeton.html
What an awesome chance at sabotage!
I seem to recall that in my visit to the Tut exhibit at the AGO in Toronto recently, Tut had good teeth, that the apparent head/neck injury was probably from post mortem handling, but that the knee injury was likely from a blow, became infected and did him in
Im Grunde genommen ist dies eine super Story, ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob das dauerhaft realistisch umsetzbar sein wird!