Tag: science

SJW is anti-science and anti-mathematics

SJWs are against more than mere fun. They also oppose science as well as math in the form of probability. Mike Cernovich drops relevant statistics on those who have attempted to attack him over daring to mention scientific hate facts.

In a post about HIV I observed, “Straight men do not contract HIV.” I did not push a narrative. I did not share what I heard on some news channel or learned from a nit-wit teacher.

Rather, I analyzed data from the United States Center for Disease Control. When you look at CDC data, you notice something.

Where are all of the straight white male HIV infections?

Relying on CDC data is considered racist and homophobic, as morons believe a scientific judgment is a moral one. Zealots are simply unable to look at scientific questions with a scientific lens and moral questions with a moral lens.

Cernovich points out that even in the impossible event that every single man with HIV is honestly reporting his sexual activity (impossible because we already know it is not true), “According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, men almost never get HIV from women. A healthy man who has unprotected sex with a non drug-using woman has a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, the odds drop to one in 50 million.”

To put it in perspective:

  • Killed by a Dog:     1 in 103,798
  • Killed by Lightning: 1 in 136,011
  • Contracting HIV: 1 in 5,000,000

The point isn’t that this means straight men should run around freely fornicating, it is that one can NEVER, EVER trust anything an SJW says about ANYTHING. They are all about the narrative, not the truth, not the science, not the statistics, not the probabilities and most certainly not the history.

Evolution and the problem of time

I always find it amusing when someone who has credentials in a subject, but is at a distinct disadvantage in IQ terms tries to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. You may recall that over the years, I have repeatedly asked various evolutionary True Believers a very simple and straightforward time-based question, to which there absolutely must be an answer, and they not only have been unable to answer it, but frequently tried to deny it was either a) relevant or b) possible, thereby demonstrating that they don’t understand ANYTHING about their own faux-scientific faith. But the speed of evolution, and of the underlying mutations, is absolutely central to understanding the theory, as well as determining whether it is total nonsense or not:

Mathematicians keep refining π even though they know it to more than 12 trillion digits; physicists beat themselves up because they cannot pin down the gravitational constant beyond three significant figures. Geneticists, by contrast, are having trouble deciding between one measure of how fast human DNA mutates and another that is half that rate.

The rate is key to calibrating the ‘molecular clock’ that puts DNA-based dates on events in evolutionary history. So at an intimate meeting in Leipzig, Germany, on 25–27 February, a dozen speakers puzzled over why calculations of the rate at which sequence changes pop up in human DNA have been so much lower in recent years than previously. They also pondered why the rate seems to fluctuate over time. The meeting drew not only evolutionary geneticists, but also researchers with an interest in cancer and reproductive biology — fields in which mutations have a central role.

“Mutation is ultimately the source of all heritable diseases and all biological adaptations, so understanding the rate at which mutations evolve is a fundamental question,” says Molly Przeworski, a population geneticist at Columbia University in New York City who attended the Human Mutation Rate Meeting….

A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and
archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution,
such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world.
But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when
extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most
recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered
dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many
researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting
multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is
assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between.

You know you’re dealing with QUALITY science when scientists start substituting variables for concrete numbers depending upon what they want the results to be. Here is the money quote: “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,” he
says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite
embarrassingly bad and uncertain.”

As I have repeatedly predicted, genuine genetic science is eventually going to kill evolution by natural selection deader than phlogiston or the Flat Earth theory.

Didn’t he see Serenity?

Stephen Hawking is a good example of why scientists should not be allowed to vote, let alone set government policy:

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all. A major nuclear war would be the end of civilisation, and maybe the end of the human race.

This is idiotic. It isn’t human aggression that threatens to destroy us all, it is science and scientists. Hawking demonstrates a complete inability to correctly utilize basic logic.

Scientists created the threat. Rather than work to remove the threat, some of the very people who created it now want to EXPERIMENT WITH THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE in order to do something that won’t remove the current threat and might well create some that are even worse.

Scientists love to posture as if they are the good guys responsible for saving the human race, but they are the party primarily responsible for endangering it in a variety of ways.

The Neanderthal theory of intelligence

It’s going to become very, very hard to dismiss the genetic basis for intelligence, or its implications for racial policies, if it is eventually determined that average intelligence is essentially a proxy for a population group’s greater or lesser amount of Neanderthal DNA:

Researchers also have found a peculiar pattern in non-Africans: People in China, Japan and other East Asian countries have about 20 percent more Neanderthal DNA than do Europeans.

Last year, Sriram Sankararaman, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues proposed that natural selection was responsible for the difference. Most Neanderthal genes probably had modestly bad effects on the health of our ancestors, Dr. Sankararaman and other researchers have found. People who inherited a Neanderthal version of any given gene would have had fewer children on average than people with the human version.

As a result, Neanderthal DNA became progressively rarer in living humans. Dr. Sankararaman and his colleagues proposed that it disappeared faster in Europeans than in Asians. The early Asian population was small, the researchers suggested, and natural selection eliminates harmful genes more slowly in small groups than in large populations. Today, smaller ethnic groups, like Ashkenazi Jews and the Amish, can have unusually high rates of certain genetic disorders.

Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and the graduate student Benjamin Vernot recently set out to test this hypothesis. They took advantage of the fact that only some parts of our genome have a strong influence on health. Other parts — so-called neutral regions — are less important.

A mutation in a neutral region won’t affect our odds of having children and therefore won’t be eliminated by natural selection. If Dr. Sankararaman’s hypothesis were correct, you would expect Europeans to have lost more harmful Neanderthal DNA than neutral DNA. In fact, the scientists did not find this difference in the DNA of living Europeans.

Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot then tested out other possible explanations for the comparative abundance of Neanderthal DNA in Asians. The theory that made the most sense was that Asians inherited additional Neanderthal DNA at a later time.

In this scenario, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans split, the early Asians migrated east, and there they had a second encounter with Neanderthals. Dr. Akey and Mr. Vernot reported their findings in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

We shouldn’t get too carried away with a scientific hypothesis that merely happens to be in line with some computer modeling; if I was inclined to that sort of thing I’d be deeply concerned about global warming. But it is a little ominous; those who think that the third world invasion of the West is harmless should keep in mind the lesson of the Neanderthals. They may have been smarter, but they’re not around anymore and Homo sapiens sapiens is.

For all we know, there were once Neanderthals who claimed any Neanderthal who thought those nice Homo Sapiens who moved into the cave next door would be a problem were sub-speciesist, and besides, weren’t their spiced triceratops eggs ever so tasty?

Desperately seeking the steady state

For some strange reason, some scientists intensely dislike the idea of the universe having a discrete beginning point. I can’t imagine why….

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.

Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

The physicists emphasize that their quantum correction terms are not applied ad hoc in an attempt to specifically eliminate the Big Bang singularity.

Let’s see. The evidence suggests that “the law of physics appear to break down”. That would be non-natural, perhaps one might say, “supernatural”. So obviously, logic and evidence must be ruled out of bounds in favor of math that adds up correctly!

The mere fact that the physicists are “emphasizing” that they are not doing what they are observably doing tends to cast more than a little doubt on their theory. Perhaps the math will hold up, perhaps it won’t. But it won’t surprise me to see this turn out to be about as credible as historical South American temperature data revisions.

Using the quantum-corrected Raychaudhuri equation, Ali and
Das derived quantum-corrected Friedmann equations, which describe the
expansion and evolution of universe (including the Big Bang) within the
context of general relativity.

Corrected, revised… we sure seem to see scientists using those words a lot these days.

The biggest science scandal ever

And yes, as we AGW/CC skeptics have been saying since the beginning, the world is not getting warmer and you cannot trust corrupt scientists anymore than you can trust corrupt bankers or corrupt politicians. Global warming is a fraud and a scandal of global proportions:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded.

There has been some discussion about the discrepancy between the post-1979 satellite data and the surface-temperature record, as the former shows no sign of global warming while the latter has recently begun to do so. Now we have the answer explaining that discrepancy; the surface-temperature record has been corrupted and is false.

Notice that intrepid scientists went to the trouble of falsifying the data in places where it would be relatively difficult to check what they were reporting. This is genuinely a massive scandal, and if scientists don’t quickly denounce what has taken place, all scientists are soon going to lose even more credibility with the public once people see what a tremendous scam has been perpetrated by scientists operating on the public dime.

Science and the Middle Ages

Tim O’Neill explains why the false view of science coming to a halt during the Middle Ages is not merely incorrect, but is the result of anti-Christian Enlightenment propaganda.

The
standard view of the Middle Ages as a scientific wasteland has
persisted for so long and is so entrenched in the popular mind largely
because it has deep cultural and sectarian roots, but not because it has
any real basis in fact.  It is partly based on anti-Catholic prejudices
in the Protestant tradition, that saw the Middle Ages purely as a
benighted period of Church oppression.  It was also promulgated by
Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire and Condorcet who had an axe to
grind with Christianity in their own time and projected this onto the
past in their polemical anti-clerical writings. By the later Nineteenth
Century the “fact” that the Church suppressed science in the Middle Ages
was generally unquestioned even though it had never been properly and
objectively examined.

It was the early historian of science, the
French physicist and mathematician Pierre Duhem, who first began to
debunk this polemically-driven view of history.  While researching the
history of statics and classical mechanics in physics, Duhem looked at
the work of the scientists of the Scientific Revolution, such as Newton,
Bernoulli and Galileo.  But in reading their work he was surprised to
find some references to earlier scholars, ones working in the supposedly
science-free zone of the Middle Ages.  When he did what no historian
before him had done before and actually read the work of Medieval
physicists like Roger Bacon (1214-1294), Jean Buridan (c. 1300- c.
1358), and Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-1382) he was amazed at their
sophistication and he began a systematic study of the until then ignored
Medieval scientific flowering of the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries.

What
he and later modern historians of early science found is that the
Enlightenment myths of the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age
suppressed by the dead hand of an oppressive Church were nonsense. 
Duhem was a meticulous historical researcher and fluent in Latin,
meaning he could read Medieval scientific works that had been ignored
for centuries.  And as one of the most renowned physicists of his day,
he was also in a unique position to assess the sophistication of the
works he was rediscovering and of recognising that these Medieval
scholars had actually discovered elements in physics and mechanics that
had long been attributed to much later scientists like Galileo and
Newton.  This did not sit well with anti-clerical elements in the
intellectual elite of his time and his publishers were pressured not to
publish the later volumes of his Systeme de Monde: Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic
– the establishment of the time was not comfortable with the idea of
the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age being overturned. 

One thing I learned in writing The Irrational Atheist was to never trust “what everybody knows” about history. It’s more than MPAI, it’s more than a general ignorance about history; the fact is that most people who consider themselves to be educated with regards to history are, in demonstrable fact, maleducated. They’ve been given a false narrative that is belied by the actual documentary evidence.

Science is raciss

It’s now impossible to claim that we are all the same under the skin, thanks to DNA phenotyping.

Parabon’s Snapshot Forensic system is said to be able to accurately predict genetic ancestry, eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, freckling, and face shape in individuals from any ethnic background.

Each prediction is presented with a ‘measure of confidence’.

As an example, the test can say a person has green eyes with 61 per cent confidence, green or blue with 79 per cent confidence, and that they definitely don’t have brown eyes, with 99 per cent confidence.

Based on ancestry, and other markers, the test also creates a likely facial shape. From all of this information, it builds a computer generated e-fit.

Science is gradually obliterating the secular myths, one by one. My expectation is that most of the “racist pseudo-science” that was supposedly falsified (and which in most cases was simply declared out of bounds by equalitarian anti-scientists), are going to come back in vogue with a vengeance and on a sound scientific basis.

Cuckoo for peer review

Scientistry at its finest:

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources. “As scientists, we’re aware of the top-tier journals in our specific sub-field, but even we cannot always pinpoint if a journal in another field is real or not,” Shrime says. “For instance, the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is the very first journal I was ever published in and it’s legitimate. But the Global Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is fake. Only someone in my field would know that.”

You can trust scientists. Because global warming. And they have proven that birds are, indeed, cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

The costs of scientistry

A scientist laments the loss of scientific credibility:

If we want to use scientific thinking to solve problems, we need people to appreciate evidence and heed expert advice. But the Australian suspicion of authority extends to experts, and this public cynicism can be manipulated to shift the tone and direction of debates. We have seen this happen in arguments about climate change.

This goes beyond the tall poppy syndrome. Disregard for experts who have spent years studying critical issues is a dangerous default position. The ability of our society to make decisions in the public interest is handicapped when evidence and thoughtfully presented arguments are ignored.

So why is science not used more effectively to address critical questions? We think there are several contributing factors including the rise of Google experts and the limited skills set of scientists themselves. We think we need non-scientists to help us communicate with and serve the public better.

At a public meeting recently, when a well-informed and feisty elderly participant asked a question that referred to some research, a senior public servant replied: “Oh, everyone has a scientific study to justify their position, there is no end to the studies you could cite, I am sure, to support your point of view.”

This is a cynical statement, where there are no absolute truths and everyone’s opinion must be treated as equally valid. In this intellectual framework, the findings of science can be easily dismissed as one of many conflicting views of reality.

Such a viewpoint is dangerous from our point of view.

This is the result of scientists passing off their unscientific opinions as expertise for decades. No one trusts “science” anymore because no one trusts scientists. Everyone has seen too many idiots with advanced degrees and white coats trying to pull the Dennett Demarche, in which the scientist argues that biologists can be trusted because physics is very accurate.

This is why a clear distinction between scientody, the scientific method, and scientistry, the profession of science, is absolutely necessary. But because men are corrupt and fallen, too many scientists find it too useful to be able to cloak their unscientific (and all too often uneducated), opinions under the veil of scientific expertise.

And the writer undercuts his own argument when he laments that “evidence” (which may be scientific) and “thoughtfully presented arguments” (which have absolutely nothing to do with science) are ignored. Because the fact is that logic is not science, it is philosophy, and philosophy is exactly what scientody is designed to counteract.

Furthermore, science is intrinsically dynamic. So listening to the “real experts” in science is a guaranteed way to ensure that one ignores both logic, and in many cases, reality.