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Sam Shuster’s Hormonal Unicycling Hack

21 December 2007 – 2:10 pm by  

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In other news today, a “study” by unicycling Professor Sam Shuster that argues that men are agressive and funny while women are nurturing. It’s about their hormones, you see? Now that’s proper science.

In a rigorous trial, Shuster unicycled around his local area noticing of people’s reactions. Here’s how the BBC summarises it, a passage worth quoting at length for the punchline at the end:

“The difference between the men and women was absolutely remarkable and consistent,” said Professor Shuster.

“At 11-13 years, the boys began to get really aggressive. Into puberty, the aggression became more marked, then it changed into a form of joke. The men were snide.”

[…]

[Psychologist] Dr Nick Neave […] suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves.

“This would be particularly challenging for young males entering the breeding market and thus it does not surprise me that their responses were the more threatening.”

This is the first news story I have read for a while that physically made me laugh out loud; not, I promise, in a snide way (I am not in the breeding market) but at the sheer slapstick pantomime of the image conjured up.

Shuster isn’t a full-time sociobiologist but Professor Emeritus of Dermatology, and has a history of this sort of thing. My favourite is the following claim about Karl Marx (from The Times):

The father of communism’s life and attitudes were shaped by hidradenitis suppurativa, said Sam Shuster in the British Journal of Dermatology. One of its symptoms is alienation – a concept that Marx, a martyr to boils and carbuncles, put into words as he wrote Das Kapital.

That explains that, then.

Shuster also has a Comment Is Free blog on which he’s posted just one article, a piece claiming that performance-enhancing drugs used in sport may not enhance performance at all.

This one is clearly a piece of pretty wild speculation. It speaks in generalisations, implying we should assume that no drug could possibly enhance performance in any sport, and then doubles back and says that any drugs that did enhance performance wouldn’t pose any problems anyway (engaging with some of the issues we did during last summer’s cycling debacle). Shuster describes himself here and elsewhere as a “clinical scientist”, a made-up title that conveniently obscures the fact that he’s way outside his field.

It seems likely that Shuster is a wind-up merchant. Maybe he just enjoys getting into the papers by publishing wacky stuff in journals that ought to know better. (It’s also likely that he’s contributed to the store of human knowledge; they don’t give out Professorships Emeritus for nothing).

Engaging in debates you don’t know much about is fun and we’d be hypocritical at Big I if we disapproved of it, since we do it all the time. But it matters which debates you’re engaging with and how you’re doing it.

This reminds me of an observation Richard Stallman made in his piece On Hacking:

Going on [MIT’s] great dome is “forbidden” […]. Nonetheless, the MIT museum proudly exhibited photos of some of the best dome hacks, as well as some of the objects that hackers placed on the dome in their hacks. The MIT administration thus implicitly recognizes that “breaking security” is not necessarily evil and need not be invariably condemned. Whether security breaking is wrong depends on what the security breaker proceeds to do with the “forbidden” access thus obtained. Hurting people is bad, amusing the community is good.

Similarly, we might look at Shuster’s “hacks” — his media-friendly interventions into debates in which he is not an expert — and ask whether the they’re good hacks or bad ones.

Certainly the drugs-in-sport hack seems like a good one. The piece is thought-provoking and advances an unusual idea. The idea is controversial and unlikely to be widely adopted without further scrutiny, but it breaks some ground and potentially gets a debate going. We need people coming up with leftfield ideas even if they turn out to be rubbish, because they force us to think. And just occasionally they’re not rubbish.

The Marx hack is funny, but that’s about it. A few of the right-leaning press and blogs carried it approvingly as just another reason to laugh at silly old socialists who used to think Marx was pretty interesting. It was all just his boils talking, you see? Like poor old Richard E Grant in How To Get Ahead In Advertising, except that in his case the boil’s a free-market Thatcherite.

The unicycling hack, though, doesn’t seem at all good to me. It plays up to prevailing cultural stereotypes and suggests that they have an essential, biological basis. It suggests that humour and creativity are essentially male preserves, and that women who engage in them must have something “masculine” about them. It also suggests that men who aren’t aggressive are somehow lacking in the masculinity that testosterone seems uniquely to define. Once again the papers are publishing unsubstantiated biological determinism as science, confirming existing prejudices about what it means to be a man or a woman. That’s not a clever hack if you ask me.

[The full article about unicycling is published by the British Medical Journal and requires a subscription. The unwashed masses can pay-per-view at a fairly reasonable price. Knowledge wants to be cheap.]

[Update 20071229:

The article is now available free at the BMJ.

]

[Update 20080109:

I keep finding stuff about this story. It’s the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

Here’s a great post from Bastard Logic that gives us some insight into the world of Dr Neave, who amused me greatly in the BBC article but whom I never bothered to investigate. It seems he’s not kidding, and might well have been taken in by the spoof (as, to be fair, I half was, although also to be fair this stuff isn’t anywhere near my field, and I did smell a rat, so there).

Here’s another top rant about a piece he wrote for the — wait for it — no, I’ll let you guess. Not a piece by an idiot journalist misrepresenting his research but a piece he wrote himself. You be the judge.

]