Tag: science

 A new book debunks 35 commonly-held myths about intelligence, IQ, and heritability:

In the spirit of correcting misapprehensions quickly, here are some snap answers to the first 6 questions:

1. In fact, when the same people are given very different intelligence tests, including tests constructed in the belief that there is no general factor, the general factors extracted from the disparate tests correlate at above the .9 level.
2. Mental tasks correlate with each other, and it is easy to extract a general factor (and also some group factors) so it is not unwarranted to summarize people’s general level of ability with one number.
3. Brain size is weakly related .2 to .4 with intelligence, frontal lobes probably in the higher part of that range. Brighter people have more neurons in their brains, and those neurons are more densely packed together and, perhaps counter-intuitively, have fewer connections branching off each neurone. So, intelligence does have a relation to brain function, but research is at an early stage.
4. If intelligence really varies in character between different cultures, then it should be very difficult to extract the “Western” general factor, yet in 31 countries, and using a wide variety of tests, 94 of the 97 (96.9{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3}) samples produced g either immediately or after a second factor analysis. Moreover, the g factor is about as strong in the non-Western samples as it is in typical Western samples. Most countries find “Western” intelligence tests very useful, once they have been translated and some language and specific knowledge items altered or removed. To cap it all, dogs, rats, mice, donkey and primates show g factors. It looks like an evolutionary adaptation.
5. Everyone seems to want multiple intelligences, particularly educationalists. However, even when researchers attempt to measure these multiple intelligences, the result is a series of correlated variables that produce a general factor, which is exactly what should never occur, according to the theory. Moreover, the proposer of the theory did not think it necessary to make it testable.
6. If practical intelligence could be measured, American Football teams would find it extremely useful. Instead, they use the Wonderlic intelligence test, because it correlates with some of the more complicated playing abilities. The proposer of the theory does not specify what results will prove that practical intelligence differs from general intelligence.

It’s true that IQ is an imperfect proxy for whatever multiplicity of genes happens to produce the observable differences in what we generally call intelligence. But even given the limited current state of scientage on the subject, what would have to be denied in order to completely reject intelligence and IQ, as well as their heritability, would also require the abandonment of virtually everything we believe we know on a statistical basis, as well as a considerable portion of the entire scientific knowledge base.

This is why I don’t pay much attention to IQ critics, even when they happen to be legitimately brilliant men who are otherwise well worth listening to. While their criticisms of this or that particular may be relevant, they don’t even begin to shake the foundations of what has been reliably observed to be true as well as solidly supported by scientody.

Richard Dawkins is discovering that the postchristian society he helped bring about isn’t necessarily to his liking:

The College Historical Society (the Hist) has tonight rescinded its invitation to Richard Dawkins to address the society next year.

Auditor of the Hist Bríd O’Donnell announced the cancellation in a statement on her Instagram page, saying that she had been “unaware of Richard Dawkins’ opinions on Islam and sexual assault until this evening”, adding that the society “will not be moving ahead with his address as we value our members comfort above all else”.

“The invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at the society was made by my predecessor and I followed up the invitation with limited knowledge of Mr. Dawkins”, O’Donnell said. “I had read his Wikipedia page and researched him briefly. Regretfully I didn’t look further into him before moving forward with the invitation.”

“I want to thank everyone who pointed out this valuable information to me”, O’Donnell added. “I truthfully hope we didn’t cause too much discomfort and if so, I apologise and will rectify it.”

No Christianity, no inquiry, no science. Dawkins’s central thesis was not only wrong, it was backward. Christianity and science are not only NOT at war, Christianity is a necessary condition for science, logically, historically, and observably. 

UPDATE: Bruce Charleton notes that Richard Dawkins simply lacks the intellectual courage to question his godless convictions, or even to contemplate the relevant evidence.

A few years ago I met Richard Dawkins at a small, relaxed party.

I had a question I wanted to put to him.

At the time I was not a Christian, but I was interested in religions and was (for example) studying religiosity and atheism in relation to personality.

I had discovered that over the same period of the twentieth century that the US had risen to scientific eminence it had undergone a significant Christian revival.

The point I put to Dawkins was that the USA was simultaneously by-far the most dominant scientific nation in the world (I knew this from various scientometic studies I was doing at the time) and by-far the most religious (Christian) nation in the world.

How, I asked, could this be – if Christianity was culturally inimical to science?

Dawkins simply shook off this point, with a literal shake of his head looking downwards, and the comment to the effect that the scientists and Christians were two entirely different groups of people.

Sooner or later, the physicists are bound to follow the philosophers in gradually coming to recognize the need to choose between Christianity and nihilism.

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics?

Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question.

The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well how the system further away from the equilibrium. Coincidence? May be, but as far as we know quantum and classical mechanics is exactly how the physical world works.

The second way is to start from physics. We know that quantum mechanics works pretty well on small scales and general relativity works pretty well on large scales, but so far we were not able to reconcile the two theories in a unified framework. This is known as the problem of quantum gravity. Clearly, we are missing something big, but to make matters worse we do not even know how to handle observers. This is known as the measurement problem in context of quantum mechanics and the measure problem in context of cosmology.

Then one might argue that there are not two, but three phenomena that need to be unified: quantum mechanics, general relativity and observers. 99{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} of physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is the main one and everything else should somehow emerge from it, but nobody knows exactly how that can be done. In this paper I consider another possibility that a microscopic neural network is the fundamental structure and everything else, i.e. quantum mechanics, general relativity and macroscopic observers, emerges from it. So far things look rather promising.

I’ve long been under the impression that whether it is the Big Bang, the need for a quantum observer, or a universal neural network, modern physics has relentlessly pointed towards the existence of God for those with the intelligence required to understand the evidence. I suspect that is why string theory, which is little more than the usual retreat from science that points in directions that atheists and Prometheans fear, has been holding on despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence to support the theoretical framework.

These are fascinating times. Darwin is all but dead, Einstein is being exposed, Ricardo has been destroyed, and postmodernism is fooling no one as it clowns about like a naked emperor in drag.

This suddenly explains so much of the weirdness of the last few years.

The boffins at the Catalina Sky Survey have stumbled upon an amazing and slightly goofy discovery, apparently Earth has had a second moon for the past three years and nobody noticed. This ‘mini-moon’ is actually an asteroid, measuring between 1.9 and 3.5 metres (6.2 and 11.5 feet) in diameter, that was temporarily captured by our planet’s gravity. Named 2020 CD3, we picked up our second moon some time in 2017 but, given how vast the sky is and how dark the moon is, it never caught anyone’s attention, until now.

“Ho ho,” says the keeper of the beat.

Now the Moon is 85 million years younger than it was yesterday.

Planetary geophysicists have used a new numerical model to determine that the moon is in fact 85 million years younger than previously thought, having formed from the extremely violent and unlikely collision of two protoplanets.

The boffins at the German Aerospace Center, led by Maxime Maurice, produced a model to more accurately calculate what exactly happened when the protoplanet Theia smashed into a nascent, and still-forming, Earth about 4.425 billion years ago.

Previous estimations had suggested the moon formed around 4.51 billion years ago – that is, about 85 million years earlier. The new model suggests, however, that it was millions of years later when the molten Earth was still in the process of taking shape and covered in a vast ocean of liquid magma, that the collision took place.

Whatever. I’m not going to even pretend to be interested until scientists announce their discovery that dinosaurs landed on the Moon using nuclear fusion technology developed by black scientists during the Jurassic Era 33,000 years ago.

At a certain point, one has to stop simply attributing to incompetence what was clearly done with evil intent.

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

It’s gradually becoming more apparent that neither China nor the USA was to blame for the pandemic, but rather, Deep State elements in academia, media, the DNC, the CDC, and the State Department. It increasingly appears to have been, like impeachment, a desperate attempt to derail the Trump administration.

And I suspect we all know the reason for the desperation.

Martin van Creveld writes about the limits of human knowledge:

At the heart of relativity lies the belief that, in the entire physical universe, the only absolute is the speed of light apart. Taken separately, both quantum mechanics and relativity are marvels of human wisdom and ingenuity. The problem is that, since they directly contradict one another, in some ways they leave us less certain of the way the world works than we were before they were first put on paper. The uncertainty principle means that, even as we do our best to observe nature as closely as we can, we inevitably cause some of the observed things to change. And even that time and space are themselves illusions, mental constructs we have created in an effort to impose order on our surroundings but having no reality outside our own minds. The incompleteness theorem put an end to the age-old dream—it goes back at least as far as Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE—of one day building an unassailable mathematical foundation on which to base our understanding of reality. Finally, chaos theory explains why, even if we assume the universe to be deterministic, predicting its future development may not be possible in a great many cases. Including, to cite but one well-known example, whether a butterfly flapping wings in Beijing will or will not cause a hurricane in Texas.

So far, the tendency of post-1900 science to become, not more deterministic but less so. As a result, no longer do we ask the responsible person(s) to tell us what the future will bring and whether to go ahead and follow this or that course. Instead, all they can do is calculate the probability of X taking place and, by turning the equation around, the risk we take in doing (or not doing) so. However, knowledge also presents additional problems of its own. Like a robe that is too long for us, the more of it we have the greater the likelihood that it will trip us up….

Furthermore, surely no one in his right mind, looking around, would suggest that the number of glitches we all experience in everyday life has been declining. Nor is this simply a minor matter, e.g. a punctured tire that causes us to arrive late at a meeting. Some glitches, known as black swans, are so huge that they can have a catastrophic effect not just on individuals but on entire societies: as, for example, happened in 2008, when the world was struck by the worst economic crisis in eighty years, and as coronavirus is causing right now. All this reminds me of the time when, as a university professor, my young students repeatedly asked me how they could ever hope to match my knowledge of the fields we were studying. In response, I used to point to the blackboard, quite a large one, and say: “imagine this is the sum of all available knowledge. In that case, your knowledge could be represented by this tiny little square I’ve drawn here in the corner. And mine, by this slightly—but only slightly—larger one right next to it.” “My job,” I would add, “is to help you first to assimilate my square and then to transcend it.” They got the message.

Read the whole thing. It is a master class on the importance of understanding that what you know, and what you think you know, are merely a momentary glimpse of a fragment of the whole.

Tom Wolfe anticipated the failure of modern neuroscientists to discover the soul in his 1996 essay “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died”.

If I were a college student today, I don’t think I could resist going into neuroscience. Here we have the two most fascinating riddles of the twenty–first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely. In any case, we live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless to avert your eyes from the truth.

Ironically, said Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism, is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn’t detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind (to the late–nineteenth–century’s great venereal scourge, syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart, and self–destruct. I thought about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on “Limits to Scientific Knowledge.” The consensus was that since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus, a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted, but they wouldn’t get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty notions, all of them primitive, and they can’t record anything. The project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior to the dog’s, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human beings arriving at some final, complete, self–enclosed theory of human existence is doomed, too.

This, science’s Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists for the past seventy years, has been beset by…doubts. Scientists—not religiosi—notably the mathematician David Berlinski (“The Deniable Darwin,” Commentary, June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box, 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten, the Messiah, are already screaming. They’re beside themselves, utterly apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above the battle.) By 1990 the physicist Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado had already begun going after Einstein. He greatly admired Einstein for his famous equation of matter and energy, E=mc2, but called his theory of relativity mostly absurd and grotesquely untestable. Beckmann died in 1993. His Fool Killer’s cudgel has been taken up by Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut, who has many admirers among the upcoming generation of Ultimately Skeptical young physicists. The scorn the new breed heaps upon quantum mechanics (“has no real–world applications”…”depends entirely on fairies sprinkling goofball equations in your eyes”), Unified Field Theory (“Nobel worm bait”), and the Big Bang Theory (“creationism for nerds”) has become withering. If only Nietzsche were alive! He would have relished every minute of it!

Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: “When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren’t even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other.”

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He’s floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can’t see it, but he’s much impressed. He names it God.

It’s one of his better essays. Read the whole thing. What it eventually comes down to is the obvious and incontrovertible fact that science cannot explain that which falls outside its conceptual limits. As human souls, we are projections of the infinite into material reality, which is why both physics and neuroscience have been unable to quantify, or even meaningfully describe, the phenomena of life and consciousness. Scientists will only ever be able to wrestle with the materially observable effects of those phenomena, because they lack the ability to directly observe the infinite.

And one of the primary goals of the Deceiver is to convince those projections that they have no connection to the infinite, and by doing so, eliminate it.

Martin van Creveld considers the problem of consciousness from the scientific perspective:

Starting at least as far back as Laplace—much earlier, if one cares to go back all the way to Epicurus—scientists have been arguing that consciousness grew out of the matter that preceded it. Not so, says Dr. Lanza: no natural process known to us could have performed that feat. Instead, he says, it was consciousness which gave rise to the world—so much so that, without the former, the latter could not even have existed.

To understand what he meant, take the popular riddle concerning a tree that has fallen in a forest with no one there to witness the fact. did it make a sound? Of course it did, say ninety-nine percent of those asked. Not so, say Dr. Lanza and a few others. The splintering of the trunk and its crash on the ground certainly gave rise to vibrations in the surrounding air. However, in the absence of anyone to receive those vibrations in his or her ears, transmit them by way of the acoustic nerves, and process them with the help of the brain, they would not have amounted to what we know as sound.

What applies to hearing applies equally well to our remaining senses. What the specialized neurons in the back of our brains register is not the world’s existing, objective, sound, light, and impact. On the contrary, light, impact, and sound are created by those neurons. To adduce another example, a single rainbow that can be seen by everyone who looks in the right direction at the right time does not exist. What does exist are trillions of raindrops. Each one carrying a potential rainbow; and all “waiting” to be discovered by animal sense organs and brains to be brought to bear on them. Instead of the internal and external world being separate and independent of one another, as Descartes would have it, they are merely two sides of the same coin. That, incidentally, is also the best available explanation for the riddle of quantum mechanics where, as far as we can make out, the speed and position of elementary particles seem to be determined by the fact that they are or are not observed.

This premise serves Dr. Lanza as the foundation on which to build everything else in the book, leading up to the conclusion that “the universe burst into existence from life [which is the seat of consciousness], not the other way around.” What I personally found most interesting in it is the following. We present-day humans are immensely proud of our scientific prowess. And rightly so, given that it has enabled us to study, and often gain some understanding of, anything from the bizarre submicroscopic world of elementary particles that exists right under our noses to gigantic galaxies more than thirty billion light years away. Dr. Lanza’s contribution is to point out that, without taking account of consciousness and the life with which it is inextricably tied, we shall never be able to understand reality as a whole.

One of the great conundrums that confound atheists is that while the average atheist intelligence is modestly higher than the average religious intelligence, the most intelligent individuals are considerably more religious than the norm. This is, of course, because we are less likely to cling stubbornly to our preconceived assumptions than midwits are.

Peter Hitchens helps two whistleblowers publicize their critique of the document that was used to justify US and British bombings in Syria:

The investigation report is a bait and switch tactic that creates the illusion of a report about a breach of confidentiality, when in fact it is little more than a public defence of the scientifically questioned Douma Report. Ironically, the defence, from a highly technical and scientific body, is not founded on science or logic, but on ad hominem attacks on two of its former inspectors, who had raised concerns about the scientifically indefensible manner in which the Douma investigation was conducted. It is classic ‘if you can’t get the ball, get the man’.

In another classic ruse, the Technical Secretariat tries to distract from the serious concerns of A and B, by trying to portray them as “individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence”. This is demonstrably false and conspicuously the report never says what those ‘views’ are supposed to have been. As a technical body the TS will be aware that inspections, verification, or investigations are never about ‘views’. Views are subjective by definition. They are not the currency of scientists and engineers who (should) only deal in facts, evidence and hypotheses.

It is about the suppression and cherry-picking of these facts and evidence, and the refusal to test alternative hypotheses, which is scientifically questionable, that Inspectors A and B have raised concerns with senior management. These concerns are not exclusive to A and B. Other inspectors involved in the Douma investigation have the same, but because of their contractual relationship with the Organisation are not free to raise them without fear of repercussion.

It’s a brutally-effective fisking. As usual, the Official Story and the mainstream narrative are both false.