Vox Popoli

I marvel at the fact that people find it so difficult to grasp that equality not only does not exist, it cannot exist. But I suppose one must admit that this writer’s heart is in the right place, especially considering that she’s a feminist:

Bob and Jane are a middle class couple. They have two children. They get an amicable divorce. There is a custody hearing. Both of them are good parents. Both of them want to be the primary custody holder. Who gets the children? Seriously, every single time, unless Jane lights up a crack pipe in the courtroom she will get physical custody. Bob is expected by society to be happy with every other weekend and two weeks in the summer. Don’t believe me? What would you think if you heard that a woman only saw her children every other weekend and a few holidays? I PROMISE you would think, “What did she do to lose her kids?” But, with men, that’s just the way it goes, right?

The mythic concept of quality aside, current “family court” system is insane by any rational measure. Of course, everyone is deeply shocked when boys in these situations grow up to believe all women are sluts and whores and the girls are on the pole at eighteen. There are few things so easily predictable as societal failure, and yet most people not only refuse to see it developing, but remarkably, continue to subscribe to the idea of ongoing social progress.

“Reliabilities of identifying positive selection by the branch-site and the site-prediction methods” is merely one piece of evidence indicating that TENS rests on much shakier empirical foundations than most scientists realize:

“Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions,” said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team’s leader…. To demonstrate the faultiness of the statistical methods, Nei’s team compiled data collected by their Emory University colleague, Shozo Yokoyama, on the genes that control the abilities of fish to see light at different water depths and on the genes that control color vision in a variety of animals. The team used these data to compare statistically predicted sites of natural selection with experimentally determined sites. They found that the statistical methods rarely predicted the actual sites of natural selection, which had been identified by Yokoyama through experiments.

“In some cases, statistical method completely failed to identify the true sites where natural selection occurred,” said Nei. “This particular exercise demonstrated the difficulty with which statistical methods are able to detect natural selection.”

To demonstrate how small sample sizes can lead to incorrect results, the team used computer simulations to examine the evolution of genes in three primates: humans, chimpanzees and macaques. The scientists mimicked the procedures used by the authors of a 2007 paper, which applied the branch-site method to 14,000 orthologous genes — genes that are genealogically identical among different species — and which found that the method predicted selection in 32 of the genes. Nei and his team also studied selection using Fisher’s exact test, but this test did not detect any selection.

“The results indicate that the number of nucleotide substitutions that occurred were too small to detect any selection; therefore, all of the 32 cases obtained by the branch-site method must be false positives,” said Nozawa.

“These statistical methods have led many scientists to believe that natural selection acted on many more genes in humans than it did in chimpanzees, and they conclude that this is the reason why humans have developed large brains and other morphological differences,” said Nei. “But I believe that these scientists are wrong. The number of genes that have undergone selection should be nearly the same in humans and chimps. The differences that make us human are more likely due to mutations that were favorable to us in the particular environment into which we moved, and these mutations then accumulated through time.”

Nei said that to obtain a more realistic picture of natural selection, biologists should pair experimental data with their statistical data whenever possible. Scientists usually do not use experimental data because such experiments can be difficult to conduct and because they are very time-consuming.

In other words, scientists usually do not bother to do science because it is difficult and it takes too long. But, non-scientists should still trust their results because on those rare occasions that scientists actually do make use of the scientific method, it works rather well. And, of course, one should trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results.

Needless to say, the quality of their rationalizations tends to indicate that scientists don’t often make use of logic either.

I’ve seen variants of this argument in defense of permitting bailout banks to pay massive bonuses from various parts of the political spectrum, but it makes no sense at all:

We cannot legislate to cap bonuses or pay. There is no room in a free society for a law that curbs the pay proffered in private companies.

This may be true, the problem is that a society that hands over billions of dollars in public money to private companies is no longer a free society. If the government can hand money to the banks, it can take money away from the banks just as easily. So, this is a bogus and illogical line of defense.

You may recall that I viewed the announcement of the landmark discovery of Darwinius masillae in May as an ideal candidate for the falsification of Darwinism as well as the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Or, at least, in the scientific basis for many individuals belief in such things. After all, “Ida” was described “in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her ‘the eighth wonder of the world,’ ‘the Holy Grail,’ and ‘a Rosetta Stone.'” And who can forget how researchers said that “proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.”

Of course, it didn’t take long for other scientific skeptics to cast doubt on the significance of this supposed wonder of the scientific world. And now, the ever-mutable scientific consensus appears to be in the process of concluding that Darwinius masillae is of little more significance to the theory of human evolution than Piltdown Man or any other of the many scientific frauds and exaggerations of the past.

Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group. Moreover, the trait has arisen independently in several lineages of mammals—including some lemurs—through convergent evolution. Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket. “I am utterly convinced that Darwinius has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,” he declares.

I will now await with interest for the various devotees of the cult of Darwin to admit one of the three logical possibilities that stem from this entirely predictable – and predicted – outcome:

1) The Darwinius masillae incident means that the theory of human evolution by natural selection remains unproved.

2) The Darwinius masillae incident proves that scientific assertions about the factual scientific basis for the theory of human evolution by natural selection are not intrinsically reliable.

3) The Darwinius masillae incident is irrelevant because your belief in the theory of human evolution by natural selection is not based on science.

Why the media is dying:

THE PUPPY DIARIES
Taking the Plunge With a New Dog
By JILL ABRAMSON

The first article in a weekly series about the challenges and satisfactions of raising a puppy through its first year of life.

All the news that’s fit to print….

Well, okay, it’s not so great for the Crimson Tower. But its toppling would be good for the nation and the greater Academy:

If Harvard were a serious business facing a liquidity crisis, it would have done something drastic by now: fired senior employees, closed departments, sold off real estate. But Harvard, like most other leading universities, is stubborn and inflexible. “None of these schools has the ability to cut expenses fast enough” is how a hedge-fund manager who counts Harvard among his investors explained the problem. Running the numbers for me, proving how impossible it is for a shrinking endowment to keep up with the university’s bloated, immovable costs, the hedge-fund manager concluded, “They are completely fucked.”

One particularly interesting fact about Harvard’s financial crsis is that the gentleman who created this situation is now duly employed… as the top economic advisor to the present administration.

1. Spook Country by William Gibson

2. The Cambridge Medieval History Series vol I: The Christian Era edited by J.B. Bury

3. The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert: 7/10. I was surprised to learn that this novel was published 13 years after Dune, since the ideas it contains appear to be rather less well-formed and less interesting than those in the earlier book.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles Kindleberger: 6/10. A detailed, but unsystematic chronicle of historical financial crises. Kindleberger describes these events in an engaging manner, but is handicapped by having no coherent economic or socionomic philosophy through which he can explain why they took place.

The Darwath Trilogy by Barbara Hambly: 8/10. I read The Time of the Dark as a boy and was deeply impressed by the awesome horror of the Dark. They must be one of the most inherently frightening monsters in the history of the fantasy genre. But the books are even better when seen from the perspective of an adult writer, as the scope of the books and the way in which they draw on various scientific disciplines as an integral part of the plot is truly impressive.

More from the No, It’s Still Not Working department:

The federal government has devoted $4.7 trillion to help the financial sector through its crisis, a level of assistance equal to about one-third of the overall U.S. economy, a watchdog report said Monday. Under the worst of circumstances, the report said, the government’s maximum exposure could total nearly $24 trillion, or $80,000 for every American.

I’d very much like to know how many of the nominal conservatives in the media who supported the bailouts would have done so if they’d known the price tag was going to be somewhere between $5 and 25 trillion. And it’s amusing to hear those defending the status quo protesting that the $24 trillion estimate is an unlikely, worst-case scenario.

When, one wonders, has a cost estimate of a government program EVER failed to hit the over?

I got the required information, so we’re good. In the meantime, discuss amongst yourselves.

NA sends an answer to his question about the Cook case from a military lawyer:

The fact that there is a lawsuit counts as proof of nothing. Its simply a suit. In the same way that when an accused is charged with a crime, the fact that he has been charged is not considered evidence. As well, the way I read the suit (or at least the press account of this suit) the logic is flawed. At this point President Obama is, in fact, president. Cook’s deployment would NOT violate international law under any interpretation of the Hague or Geneva conventions or customary international law.

I would agree that the Army response is puzzling. I do not agree this creates a “get out of war free card”. Each case under the UCMJ must rise or fall on its own merits. If the next Maj Cook steps forward with the intent to disobey a lawful order, the Army/Navy/Air Force can certainly prosecute if they see fit.

In such a case, an accused would be entitled to a full and fair trial, and if convicted, to a full appeal. I suspect time will tell if there are more “Maj Cook’s”

As is so often the case with lawyers, I think this gentleman’s response is essentially correct in the particulars while somehow managing to completely miss the point. There is clearly no precedent created by the revocation of Major Cook’s deployment order. It was an extrajudicial action at the discretion of the responsible officers and they could certainly decide to take the next case to court.

And while I’m not sure about whether Obama can be legally considered president if it turns out he was, in fact, Constitutionally ineligible for the office, that’s not relevant here because I was never talking about a legal “get out of war free” card. Whether the Supreme Court would decide to call shenanigans or a mulligan in the event of an ineligible office-holder doesn’t matter anywhere nearly as much as the public perception of the office-holder’s legitimacy. So, the card is an effective one so long as the Pentagon is unwilling to stand its ground in court.

I find the Pentagon’s response less puzzling because this isn’t ultimately a legal matter but more an issue of public perception. Right now, the only thing the public knows for sure is that they simply don’t possess sufficient facts to reach any definite conclusion, even if one can draw apparent conclusions from the actions of various parties. The problem is that one can ask “why would Obama ever run for office if he knew he was ineligible?” just as reasonably as one can ask “why didn’t the Pentagon prove the eligibility of the Commander in Chief in court and ship the major off to Afghanistan?”

What many on both sides of this issue fail to understand is that I’m agnostic on the matter. I only know that I don’t know… more importantly, I know that you don’t actually know either. And I also know that the birth issue stopped being a matter for laughing at the conspiracy theorists the moment that the Pentagon created an effective “get out of war free” card by revoking Major Cook’s orders.