medical research | Cork Skeptics

Our next meeting takes place on Saturday 23rd February at Blackrock Castle Observatory, starting at 8.00pm.

This talk by Dr. Marcin Szczerbinski, Lecturer in Applied Psychology at UCC, will explore genetics and the puzzles of heritability. What does it mean to say that a trait is heritable? Is there a gene for schizophrenia or a “gay gene”? What can we learn from looking at cases of identical twins raised apart, or indeed from adopted children raised together? And does genetic actually mean immutable?

These and similar questions will be addressed during what promises to be a truly insightful talk.

About the speaker: Dr. Marcin Szczerbinski is a Psychology graduate of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and of the Department of Human Communication Science, University College London. From 2001 until 2011 he was a lecturer at the Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, where he contributed to a number of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, particularly in Speech and Language Therapy. He joined UCC in January 2011.

This will be Dr. Szczerbinski’s second talk for us, following his talk on Special Educational Needs in June of 2011.

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This talk is open to the public, and is free to attend. Directions to Blackrock Castle Observatory can be found on our information page. We hope to see you there!

For our January meeting, David Robert Grimes gave us a comprehensive and entertaining talk on the misuse of statistics in the media. Starting with an explanation about how statistics can easily be distorted in the wrong hands (the maths bit), David talked about the reality behind cancer statistics and how testing for breast cancer at too early an age might actually be counter-productive. David also discussed problems with comparing relative statistics and misrepresenting small absolute changes in data as huge problems. He then considered the incursion of PR releases into journalism (“churnalism”) and false balance – the creation of artificial debates in an effort to create controversy where no scientific controversy exists. Examples of these are creationism vs evolution and climate change. David also hits on anti-vaccination and HIV denial. David finishes by suggesting what people can do to counter bias and error. It was a terrific talk, full of stories and examples.

[MP3]

David has a PhD in Medical Physics and is an accomplished actor and musician. His blog is Three Men Make a Tiger and he can be found on Twitter at @drg1985.