Before the internet, labs used to subscribe to "current contents", which was sort of the TV guide of the scientific literature. It was a list of journal articles that came out each month. The professors would then send a student off to the library to copy the articles that were of interest that were in the library's subscriptions, or send off a postcard "reprint request" to the authors to get a copy. The articles would come back in the mail, and the professor would skim it, and then the student would file them in the appropriate filing cabinet. I remember this well, as this was how I got my first gig in a lab.

Well, yeah, of course they didn't evacuate the school. Because they knew from the start that it wasn't a bomb. But admitting that would have meant that they couldn't have an exciting new episode of "Racist Dumbass Security Theater"

There were also a few cases of the drivers opening the doors on the wrong side of the train. Fortunately, not at rush hour on a packed train.

The question isn't "Can you prove creationism". It's "What evidence would you accept that would DISprove creationism." There are lots of things that could be found that would cause us to throw huge chunks of evolutionary theory in the trash heap. I can't imagine that a "young earth creationist" would ever tell you that any evidence would make them change their mind. If it's impossible to disprove, then any argument is a waste of time.

There are multiple genetic factors that are strongly linked to Autism. That's not really a huge debate in the field. None of the factors are absolute: they don't guarantee the occurrence of autism, instead, they are associated with increased risk.

This isn't a novelty in the psychiatric genetics world. The same holds true for schizophrenia, depression and other mood disorders, and most other brain disorders for that matter. It is likely that this has to do with an interaction between disease genes and environmental factors, other genetic factors, or with stochastic (random) processes.

It's not that different than most other complex diseases. For example, you may carry a risk allele for heart disease. If you follow the right diet, and have a blissful, stress-free life, you might be in luck. But, if you're carrying a second risk allele (whoops!), or down a few too many Big Macs... that risk allele will bite you in the ass. For that matter, even if you do take care of yourself, that risk allele may still bite you in the ass. It's an odds game, and each risk factor makes the odds that much worse.

As for your "experiment that everyone conveniently chooses to forget"-- there's an extensive literature of twins with Autism. It also shows that there is a strong genetic component, but it's not absolute. The concordance of Autism in twins is extremely high -- but not absolute. However, even identical twins have significant differences -- yes, even genetically. And, even though they may share the same womb, they may have siginficant differences in fetal nutrition (depending on how the placenta is located), and they may be subject to different gestational stresses or birth trauma.

In other words -- nobody's conveniently forgetting anything.

Don't forget stem cell biology.

That means... Copper thieves are the real Job Creators!

Or, to put it more charitably, medicine and psychology are far describing far more complex phenomenon than we like to admit.

For example, in psychiatric genetics, there are dozens of articles every year that find a new gene associated with a common and important condition (e.g. autism, schizophrenia, depression). After each new finding comes out, there are dozens of labs that try to replicate that finding, usually one or two replicate (or partially replicate) the finding, and five or six don't replicate it. Why is it so hard to replicate these findings? Probably because there are really dozens of independent genes that contribute to these complex disorders (probably in combination with each other), and some populations tend to have mutations in one set, while other populations tend to have mutations in another set.

We're moving towards understanding, but the disorders are far more complex than the assumption that there will be a single cause.

Why stop with Calculus? The path of modern medicine is being decided by people who can't tell a stem cell from a potato, or tell the difference between genes and jeans. We have epidemics of diseases that were largely eradicated because people aren't getting vaccinations. And we have lawmakers and voters deciding on nuclear energy and chemical waste disposal who haven't the slightest idea about what they're deciding. Calculus won't help that.

I don't know about the deep meta-analysis, but I agree that scientific papers use many of the same skills as literature. Having written more than my fair share of published scientific papers, and having been on the other side as a reviewer quite a few times, I can't stress how important it is that a manuscript needs to tell a damn story. It needs to have a point, and each paragraph needs to sell the reader on that idea. Perhaps it's not Dickens, but a paper that doesn't tell a story that the reader can follow ends up on the scrap heap in a hurry.

There are plenty of brain issues that aren't well modeled in mice, such as anything involving the prefrontal cortex (the front of the brain, where most of the higher-order thoughts reside). Mice just don't really have a true prefrontal cortex, which is where we do much of our higher-order thinking. The cousin of this gene, RGS4, showed up as a candidate gene for schizophrenia; mice lacking the gene are largely unaffected. The same case is true for most mouse models of psychiatric disorders, for that matter.

Also, there's not that much literature on RGS14 at this point (it doesn't seem to have come up in any of the GWAS -- wide scale genome association studies) for psychiatric disorders, but it has been identified in molecular studies as a target of P53 (a central cancer regulatory mechanism). It would not be out of the question for this knockout to have a significant increase in cancer risk (brain or elsewhere), but not have this detected in a small-scale study.

No, it's "Pud" from F-d company. Pull the wiki page on Blippy, and it points to Pud's page, complete with a photo with him wearing a "I'd rather be masturbating" t-shirt. Sure, I'll trust my credit card numbers to Pud. No problem.

I haven't seen anyone mention that the growth in Autism spectrum disorders may be partially due to geek lovin'.