Category: Uncategorized

Precision in biology

Only a 67% error rate. Why is that so completely unsurprising? I continue to find it remarkable that biologists insist on inserting their uneducated noses into other fields of study when they quite clearly have no idea what they’re doing in their own scientific discipline:

The world’s plant life is far less diverse than previously thought, with a review of about one million named plants finding that only one third of them are unique. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in southwestern London, has published “The Plant List” online Wednesday, updating a project conceived 130 years ago by the British naturalist Charles Darwin.

The list attempts to identify every plant known to science, and was begun in the 1880s with the help of a bequest from Darwin. The review found 300,000 unique species, and 480,000 synonyms for those species, meaning that many had been “discovered” and named several times by botanists. Another 260,000 names were listed as “unresolved,” meaning that botanists have so far been unable to determine whether they are a separate species of a duplication of one of the 300,000.

In the immortal words of Bill Belichick: “Do your job.” And yes, in answer to a question from one previous commenter, the fact that biologists can’t even be relied upon to correctly define a “species” or reliably identify them does very much call into serious question their various theories regarding the origin of those species. Or, you know, whatever they are.

“Well, we can’t tell you what it is, or even what “it” means, when we are examining what is right in front of us. But we can tell you with complete and utter confidence exactly how, and from what, these things that we can’t define or identify were developed thousands of years ago. And if you don’t believe us, then you just don’t understand science.”

Mmm-kay. I have come to the conclusion that many, if not most, biologists not only don’t grasp basic logic, they are not terribly clear on the concept of history either. Most people understand that if they said X yesterday and Y today, others will tend to find them less than perfectly credible and rather expect them to say Z tomorrow. The biologist, on the other hand, insists that X is really Y if you just squint hard enough and denies that there could ever possibly be Not-Y, not infrequently prior to Nature publishing an article declaring that Y, formerly believed to be X, has now been replaced by Z… or amusingly, in some cases, a new variant of X. And, as this botanical news yet again confirms, you don’t have to know what the variables are in order to recognize the dynamic pattern.

This was my favorite part: “Despite the surprising lack of diversity among plant life, the botanists and scientists associated with the project all hailed it as a milestone achievement for many different reasons.”

Congratulations, you finally figured out just how wildly inept your colleagues have been for the last 130 years. No doubt this very brief interregnum of inaccuracy will be rapidly and scientifically swept beneath the historical carpet. In fact, the error rate is worse than reported two-thirds; they were only able to specifically identify 29 percent since 25 percent are still “unresolved”. Now, no doubt this incident will tempt some intrepid devotee of Science Reason to resort to one of his favorite mantras: “science is self-correcting”. But as JQP has pointed out, this touching religious claim notwithstanding, science is not “self-correcting” in any way, shape, or form. Accountants also audit each other’s work and actually do so much more often than scientists attempt to replicate other scientists’ experiments… to the extent that scientists even do any experiments in the first place. And yet we don’t consider accounting to be “self-correcting” simply because the books may be audited at some point in the future. As for peer review, that is more commonly known as “editing” by the rest of the publishing world. There is a word that best describes any field in which news reports regularly involve the words “than previously thought”. That word is “unreliable”.

Even economists, whose imprecision borders on legendary at this point, usually manage to do better than this. Can you imagine if the quarterly GDP revisions reported $14.4 trillion for Q4 2010, subsequently revised to $4.2 trillion? (The scary thing is that’s not actually unthinkable if one considers the amount of credit supporting those numbers.) Or if Bloomberg reported that the Dow dropped from 11,755 to 3,391. The only reason biologists can get away with this astounding level of imprecision is that their butterfly collecting and theoretical fairy tales don’t have much material significance in the real world.

More biologist brilliance

I have no doubt that many young schoolchildren with an interest in the life sciences dream of studying biology, traveling to exotic foreign lands, studying wonderful animals… and killing them:

Some scientists studying penguins may be inadvertently harming them with the metal bands they use to keep track of the tuxedo-clad seabirds, a new study says. The survival rate of King penguins with metal bands on their flippers was 44 percent lower than those without bands and banded birds produced far fewer chicks, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The theory is that the metal bands — either aluminum or stainless steel — increase drag on the penguins when they swim, making them work harder, the study’s authors said.

Science: it’s all about the self-correction. And here you thought I was exaggerating when I said that biologists are rather stupid. They can’t even figure out that strapping metal onto swimming birds just might be a problem, and yet they expect us to swallow their latest Evolutionary Fairy TaleStable Strategy they just concocted to replace the one that previously proved absurd. I probably shouldn’t keep cracking jokes about empirically testing natural selection by painting polar bears pink… no doubt there is a biologist out there who would think it’s a great idea.

R.I.P. Dick Winters

The Band of Brothers has lost its leader:

Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died. Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight.

Strangely, this marks the second time Maj. Winters has died in the last month. Ender managed to get him killed as he led Easy Company to victory at the very end of Purple Heart Lane, the ASLSK scenario which recreates the machine gun ambush at Carentan on June 12, 1944.

A squad of men followed Lt. Harry Walsh into town, but facing machine gun fire from the edge of town, the rest of his men froze into ditches alongside the road. With Battalion HQ yelling encouragement from the rear, acting Company Commander Lt. Dick Winters jumped into the road and screamed for his men to follow. Having never heard Winters scream before, Easy Company quickly attacked down the road, distracting the enemy machine gun nest enough for Lt. Walsh and his men to neutralize it.

It was fitting that MMP paid Winters the compliment of identifying him as a 9-2 leader. He merited it. If you haven’t seen Band of Brothers yet, I would highly recommend it. Very highly. It was extraordinary to watch the dramatization of the infantry battles, then listen to the comments of the men who survived them. And you cannot watch the series without coming away with a deep and abiding respect for the calm warrior and leader of men that Dick Winters was.

Science Reason in action

Telic Thoughts presents an amusing chronicle of PZ Myers and his response to the Arizona shooting:

Upon hearing that a democratic congresswoman had been shot, the scientist PZ Myers immediately discards science to make this rather unscientific hypothesis about a man who’s name he didn’t even know yet.

“I’ll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I’ll bet he’ll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.”

PZ’s only evidence comes in the form of a Palin campaign poster featuring a map of targeted campaign races with “targets” over the congressional districts that were targeted. Then facts start to come in. The shooter had exhibited disturbed behavior. The shooter was an atheist. The shooter read Marx, Hitler, and Rand. Rambling nonsensical web screeds?

PZ responds to the evidence with more emotional, partisan non-science:

“What I see are people who are far too quick to dismiss the right-wing hate speech as a causal factor. Yes, this shooter was a lunatic; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hearing the drumbeats from the right.”

More evidence comes in fast. Former acquaintances and friends call him a liberal activist. Radical. An atheist. A 9/11 truther. A pothead.

PZ doubles down.

Now, there is certainly nothing wrong in making guesses about why something happened. And those guesses are bound to reflect our biases in one way or another. But it is interesting to compare the irrational reactions of left-wingers like Myers and Paul Krugman, who have clung to their immediate and biased suppositions rather than abandoning them in the face of the documentary and testimonial evidence, with a more rational albeit equally incorrect reaction.

The left-wing supposition was based, as Telic Thoughts notes, on pure personal prejudice. There simply wasn’t any reasonable justification for the conclusion. There haven’t been any shootings by members of the Tea Party and or many shootings inspired by talk radio; the example that has been cited on various sites is a fictional one from a movie called The Fisher King.

Now, my initial suppositions were also incorrect. My very first thought when I heard about it was that the shooting was probably immigration-related because Arizona has been such a national hotspot on that issue. I didn’t know if it was more likely to be someone who was pro-immigration or anti-immigration because I didn’t know the congresswoman’s position on the matter. I initially assumed the shooter was an anti-immigrationist since Giffords is a Democrat and most Democrats are supporters of unlimited third world immigration. But I looked up her record, discovered the woman was considered to be somewhat of a restrictionist on the issue, and therefore concluded incorrectly that the shooter was likely to be some sort of La Raza fanatic disappointed by the failure of the DREAM act.

“[T]his could be the result of a personal issue, for all we know right now…. I would guess that it’s a Hispanic college student who is an illegal alien and has lived in the USA all his life. I can’t imagine it was anyone even loosely associated with the Tea Party in any way since they tend to be more focused on Washington players. It’s probably not a pro-lifer either, since they would be more interested in targeting abortion doctors than politicians.“

When one takes a logical approach to observing and interpreting the world’s events, one is forced to consider all the various possibilities regardless of one’s biases. Hence my consideration of the various possibilities that the shooter might have been an anti-immigrationist, a Tea Partier, or a pro-lifer. (I never considered the gold standard or anti-federalism to be even remote possibilities since the shooter might as reasonably have targeted a Cardinals cheerleader as a congresswoman if one of those issues happened to be his motivation.) And while my conclusions could certainly have been skewed by my own biases, at least there was a coherent and logical basis unrelated to them for reaching it. This also meant I had no vested interest in clinging to my initial surmise. So, once it became obvious that the shooter was not a Hispanic, but a young white male who was not a military veteran, I correctly concluded that the shooter was an atheist with personal problems. “Schizoid atheist” was the term I used. The schizophrenia hasn’t been confirmed yet, but the atheism has. Again, I did not reach that conclusion because of my personal biases, but because it fit the model of numerous recent shootings by other young white men around the world.

Myers, on the other hand, believed as he did only because he very much wanted to believe it. His initial conclusion was based on absolutely zero evidence, and he has continued to stick with it in the face of all the available evidence. As one of his commenters correctly pointed out, there is no indication that the shooter had any knowledge of the Palin “crosshairs” map that has the hysterical Left in full point-and-shriek mode. What passes for Myers’s reasoning in this incident goes a long way towards explaining the central basis of his criticism of religious beliefs; he is quite clearly projecting his own habit of belief for belief’s sake upon those who possess them. Moreover, it is amusing to note how his inability to adjust his thinking on the basis of the evidence is consistent with the inflated importance he ascribes to scientific evidence; because he has to reject the validity of documentary and testimonial evidence in order to justify his belief in the non-existence of God, he cannot permit himself to be swayed by those forms of evidence with regards to matters he considers less important. And so, the truth of what was written nearly 2,000 years ago is made evident.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools…”

It is particularly amusing to see the ready willingness of a self-proclaimed skeptic who disdains documentary evidence to fall for a forged document. And this comment by Lou Cypher related to the forgery nicely underlines the aforementioned Pharyngulan predilection for projection.

“It doesn’t matter what the facts are, if the teabaggers repeat a lie frequently enough it evidently magically stops being a lie in the eyes of the public, so once they decide to posthumously change his party affiliation to ‘D’ that’s basically the end of the discussion right there.”

How I love the smell of irony in the morning….

UPDATE: And there goes the remnant of PZ’s “right wing talk radio incitement” meme. “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio.”

Does anyone doubt that this won’t slow any of the brainless Lefties from continuing to argue that even if right-wing discourse didn’t have anything to do with this incident, it might next time.

A tale of two bad ideas

It occurs to me that American police would be wise to consider abandoning their police state mentality sooner rather than later. Despite their ongoing militarization, the badge gang isn’t actually capable of enforcing the law or anything else upon the population. They only look as if they are in control so long as the populace is largely law-abiding of its own free will. Consider the following anecdote from just across the border:

11/23/2010 CIUDAD JUAREZ — In the bloodstained chaos that is Mexico’s drug war raging on the doorstep of the United States, Erika Gandara, 28, is standing tall, and alone. As her town’s only police officer “I am the law,” she says…. “Yes, I am a police officer,” the fresh-faced Gandara, who might be mistaken for a high (secondary) school student in her purple hoodie if she were not packing an [A]R-15 rifle, told AFP in an interview in her sparsely furnished office.

“I am this town’s only cop. I am the law,” she said.

And she meant it.

I remember reading that a few months ago and thinking that it was a classic example of female bravado, which rests entirely upon the false notion that a woman’s sex renders her untouchable. Needless to say, I wasn’t terribly surprised to read this today.

“Érika Gándara, 28, seemed to relish the role, posing with a semiautomatic rifle and talking openly about the importance of her new job. “I am the only police in this town, the authority,” she told reporters. Then, two days before Christmas, a group of armed men took her from her home, residents say, and she has not been seen since.”

I’m not sure which was more ill-conceived, Gandara’s brief career as a police chief or Pippa Bacca’s attempt to hitchhike across Turkey in a wedding dress. Regardless, they appear to have come to the same end. And speaking of ill-conceived notions, both the government and the police should keep in mind that it is not wise to aim into the abyss.

“An ardent atheist”

As some of the usual suspects have been attempting to pull out Sam Harris’s classic “No True Atheist” argument to which they retreat every time the atheism of a mass murderer or spree killer is mentioned, I thought it would be pertinent to quote this Associated Press article about Arizona shooter:

Over time, Loughner became increasingly introspective — what one of the friends described as a “nihilistic rut.” An ardent atheist, he began to characterize people as sheep whose free will was being sapped by the government and the monotony of modern life.

Thus perishes Uber Dawks’s claim that Loughner’s atheism was “highly debatable”. I further note that the atheist killed six times more people than did the secular Catholic authorities following the trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo combined… more than 375 years ago. Now, atheism doesn’t cause anyone to kill by itself. The vast majority of atheists, like the vast majority of theists, will never intentionally do physical harm to anyone. But there is no question that the rejection of objective divine morality that atheism necessarily entails removes considerable rational obstacles from murder and other moral offenses. The danger created by this rejection is that it leaves the atheist answerable to nothing more than his subjective and dynamic morality, which despite the partial barriers of intellectual pretensions and moral parasitism, ultimately consists of emotion, desire, and passing fancies.

Unmasking the badge gang

And here the police are always saying that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide:

Dozens of anti-gang police officers across the city are quitting their assignments over a requirement to reveal personal financial information under strict anti-corruption rules, The Associated Press has learned. Gang units in some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods are being left with multiple vacancies, with officers choosing instead to work regular patrol shifts, Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger said Monday.

That might be an interesting way to end the drug war. Simply impose the same anti-corruption rules on the DEA, the ATF, and the associated divisions of the big city police departments.

Answering an atheist’s question

An atheist asks why believers are hostile toward atheists, then answers her own question in a manner she probably didn’t intend:

Why are believers so hostile toward atheists? Is there anything atheists can say about our atheism — or even just about our lives — that won’t make people look at us with revulsion?

The short answer is no, not really, because the self-styled atheist is usually an intrinsically repellent individual for the very reasons that caused him to primarily identify himself on the peculiar basis of one very specific non-belief. The reason that believers, agnostics, and even other atheists all dislike atheists who identify themselves as atheists is because they don’t like annoying, dishonest, and literally self-righteous people with social handicaps who reject every objective moral or ethical code. You don’t have to be an asshole to call yourself an atheist, but it quite clearly helps. After all, as the 2008 ARIS study showed, the even vast majority of atheists are not willing to call themselves atheists!

While atheism is defined as a belief that gods do not exist,(or sometimes an absence of belief in gods, although in practice it is really just a subset of a materialist philosophy), identifying oneself an atheist is a conscious choice to announce to the world that one’s disbelief in gods is a defining and important aspect of one’s life. I don’t believe in fairies, but I never describe myself as an afairiest because that does not define me in any way, shape or form. When asked about his religion, an atheist could just as easily say that he does not have a religion instead of making a contentious assertion that God does not exist – in fact, most de facto atheists do precisely that – but the self-proclaimed atheist prefers the latter. And therein lies the heart of the answer.

Only an atheist could possibly find it a mystery why believers might be just a little bit hostile towards atheists like Uber Dawks, who sent this email yesterday: Color me not at all shocked that your kind hastily pointed out Jared Lee Loughner’s highly debatable atheism. This only serves as further evidence that the religious right is completely intolerant of those who hold to an atheistic view. Like McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho or James Jay Lee before him, Loughner’s atheism has absolutely nothing to do with his actions [Or Stalin’s, or Mao’s, or Pol Pot’s… they keep saying that and their co-non-religionists just keep inexplicably killing more people. It’s a mystery – VD] and to make any claim to the contrary is tantamount to bigotry-fueled profiling. It is more than obvious that the man was mentally unhinged and given his reading material was reacting irrationally and violently to the barrage of capitalist and biblical rhetoric coming from the right-wing. If you “money, guns n’ bibles” types would stop forcing your silly notions upon the rest of us, we might be able to prevent misguided and mentally ill young men like this one from taking this kind of action.

Unless religion is finally replaced with science and reason, this illness and the violent reaction to it will keep on perpetuating. That is what religious belief is, an illness. Whenever a Christian asks why religious scientists are not hired for certain positions in academia or do not get their contracts renewed, the answer is simple. It is because their religious affliction affects their ability to do their work, just as the affliction of an alcoholic or serious drug addict leads to a similar inability. Like the illness of alcoholism and drug addiction, we need to treat these harmful behaviors for the good of both the individual and the society.

There is an impressive abuse of logic in that little atheist rant. Unlike the small-a de facto atheist who merely doesn’t happen to believe that gods exist, the self-styled atheist is much more accurately described as an anti-religionist in general and anti-Christian in particular. And again, only a socially autistic Capital-A atheist would find it hard to understand why religious people might be hostile towards anti-religious people who actively want to eliminate their holidays, their jobs, and in some cases, even their lives.

Moreover, no one likes a liar and most atheists lie about the source of their atheism. Greta Christina herself is clearly not telling the truth when she writes: When atheists make it clear that we gave religion a sincere try, that we considered the question seriously and thoughtfully and finally came to the conclusion that the god hypothesis was implausible and unsupported by any good evidence… religious believers then have to come up with an explanation for why God hasn’t revealed himself to us.

We can easily confirm this to be untrue on several levels. First, while most atheists claim that they gave religion a sincere try, it is patently obvious when they haven’t because one can reliably expose an atheist’s ignorance of even the most basic Christian doctrine, let alone more obscure religious doctrines, with only two or three simple questions. Second, the age at which most people become atheists indicates that it is almost never an intellectual decision, but an emotional one. (This is why most self-identified atheists are angry, bitter, and immature. The anger, bitterness, and immaturity are usually the cause of the atheism, they are not, as many Christians erroneously suppose, the effects.) Third, Greta reveals her own ignorance of the Bible and Christian doctrine and her own dishonesty as well when she claims that “religious believers then have to come up with an explanation for why God hasn’t revealed himself to us”. No, as a matter of fact, we don’t. There are a number of explanations provided in various religious scriptures, including both the Old and New Testaments, among others.

He does not answer when people cry out because of the arrogance of the wicked. Indeed, God does not listen to their empty plea; the Almighty pays no attention to it. How much less, then, will he listen when you say that you do not see him….
– Job 35:12-14

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
– John 1:9-12

Or, to put it in omniderigent terms, atheists are among the vessels made to be broken.

The combination of ignorance, epistemic incoherence, and ill-founded arrogance that is necessary to label oneself an atheist is as distasteful to the average individual as it is contemptible to the intellectual. When one combines those qualities with the social autism and hate-filled evangelicalism that is all too commonly displayed by atheists, it is a wonder that they are tolerated as much as they are. All evangelicalism is not the same. If someone is attempting to save you from fiery destruction, their intentions toward you are clearly good. If, on the other hand, someone is attempting to kick the crutch upon which you are leaning out from under you, their intentions are clearly evil.

Few, if any, believers are hostile to people who simply don’t believe in God on the mere basis of their not sharing the believer’s beliefs. Pity is the much more common attitude. But hostility towards anti-religious, untrustworthy individuals with evil intentions is not only explicable, it is entirely justified. And if Greta genuinely wants believers to look at her with less revulsion, perhaps she should simply concern herself with living her life according to her own beliefs rather than spending it attempting to interfere with the lives and beliefs of others.

On a final note, let me explain one aspect of this very slowly for the less socially adept atheists. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are correct and that there is no God. We shall suppose that you are right and I am wrong. Let us also suppose, again for the sake of argument, that I am more beautiful than you are. Now, neither your being more right than I am nor my being more beautiful than you are has to have any affect on how we regard the other living his life. But how would you look at me if I went so far as to define and label who I am as being “not ugly like you”? What would you say if I asked you if there was anything I could say about your relative lack of beauty when compared to me that would not make you look at me with revulsion? And why do you think you can do that sort of thing to believers without suffering the obvious social consequences?

Col. Macgregor on the Neocon Wars

A military officer points out that the Great Depression 2.0 is not only going to bring the Neocon Wars to an end, but expose the conceit and deceit that served as their foundation.

When it comes down to a choice of spending trillions of American tax dollars to economically transform and police hostile Muslim societies with dysfunctional cultures or funding Medicare and Medicaid, entitlements will win, and the interventions will end.

When the budget ax falls, many inconvenient facts will come to light, unmasking the great deception that America confronted a serious military threat in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a deception promoted and fostered by politicians and ambitious generals who sought to gain from it. It will horrify and discourage Americans to learn we’ve bankrupted ourselves in a fight that always was analogous to clubbing baby seals. From 2001 onward, we never confronted armies, air forces or capable air defenses. Bottom line: There was no existential military threat to the United States or its NATO allies emanating from Afghanistan or the Middle East. There is none today.

It’s too soon to tell, but reductions in defense spending may demonstrate that it’s far less expensive to protect the United States from Islamist terrorism as well as the criminality flooding in from Mexico and Latin America by controlling our borders and immigration. We must, however, stop wasting American blood and treasure on misguided military interventions designed to drag Muslim Arabs and Afghans through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the space of a few years, at gunpoint. They will have to do these things themselves.

Well said and summarized. What a pity that so few ranking members of the American military were willing to speak out about what was always a shamefully stupid series of unnecessary invasions and military occupations doomed to failure. It is somewhat astonishing that the media and politicians are in an uproar over one little girl murdered in Arizona given their complicity in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of little girls that American military forces have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Calling those deaths “collateral damage” doesn’t justify them; one could just as easily justify the Arizona fatalities using the same excuse.

WND column

The Darkening Days

In the past, most historians who have seen a connection between economic events and political or social events have considered it to be a material one. When viewed from this mechanistic perspective, there is a rational explanation for even the most seemingly irrational actions. Japan’s decision to attack the much more powerful United States during World War II is therefore explained by her need for South Pacific oil, while the present U.S. democratic imperialism is either driven by the desire to control Iraqi oil fields or defend the reserve status of the dollar.