Tag: science

Exploding orthodoxy

Charles Murray anticipates that “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” by Nicholas Wade, is going to explode more equalitarian minds than his own landmark work did:

The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific
tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The
Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close
to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be
of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second,
popularized by the late paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould,
is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences
stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a
contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in
1984.

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research. Nicholas Wade, for more than 20 years a highly regarded science writer at the New York Times, has written a book that pulls back the curtain….

At the heart of the book, stated quietly but with
command of the technical literature, is a bombshell. It is now known
with a high level of scientific confidence that both tenets of the
orthodoxy are wrong.

Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken
on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right,
then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people
into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that’s exactly
what happens. A computer given a random sampling of bits of DNA that are
known to vary among humans—from among the millions of them—will cluster
them into groups that correspond to the self-identified race or
ethnicity of the subjects. This is not because the software assigns the
computer that objective but because those are the clusters that provide
the best statistical fit. If the subjects’ ancestors came from all over
the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the
five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native
Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New
Guinea. If the subjects all come from European ancestry, the clusters
will instead correspond to Italians, Germans, French and the rest of
Europe’s many ethnicities. Mr. Lewontin was not only wrong but
spectacularly wrong. It appears that the most natural of all ways to
classify humans genetically is by the racial and ethnic groups that
humans have identified from time out of mind.

Stephen Jay Gould’s
assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left
Africa has also proved to be wrong—not surprisingly, since it was so
counterintuitive to begin with.

Those who still stubbornly cling to their antiscientific belief in human equality are the Flat Earth Society of our day. There is truly nothing surprising here except the name of the author; for a New York Times columnist to abjure liberal race orthodoxy is like a sitting cardinal of the Catholic Church publishing a book declaring that God does not exist.

All the dogma goodthink with which we were raised, all the statements about “race is only skin deep” and “it’s not genetics, its the culture” and “deep inside we’re all the same” are nothing more than children’s tale meant to obscure the frightening truth. Science is gradually peeling away the orthodox falsehoods; soon it will be impossible to conceal the important and necessary discussions about reality under nonsensical accusations of racism.

It will be interesting to see how science-loving equalitarians react to the discovery that they will have to choose between science and their faith. I expect that most of them will react as they did when economics made incontrovertibly clear the intrinsic contradictions of socialism and stubbornly cling to their antiscientific beliefs without admitting that they have openly rejected science.

The intrinsic unreliability of science

This 19x rise in retractions should suffice to put the lie to the ridiculous idea that published scientific papers are the best means of determining truth, let alone the only one:

In the first decade of the 21st century, retractions of papers published by medical journals went up 19 fold, although the number of manuscripts being published only increased 44 percent. The reasons behind this surge in evidence of scientific falsification were examined in a recent editorial in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (the Red Journal), published in October 2013.

“One of the greatest, and sadly all too common, challenges facing a contemporary medical journal editor is the adjudication of ethical integrity issues,” Editor-in-Chief Anthony L. Zietman wrote. “I had originally presumed that this would be just an occasional role, but it transpires that these problems are quite widespread, ranging from unconscious and unwitting naivete to the conscious and willful betrayal of scientific trust.”

Studies suggest that a majority of papers are retracted due to deliberate falsification by researchers, rather than simple mistakes.

Science fetishists have long ignored the fundamental flaw in the system of modern science; it is only as reliable as the moral character of the scientists involved permits. Of course, this could be seen as a positive; more science fiction is being published than ever before!

The seeds of bad science

Rupert Darwell traces them in a book entitled The Age of Global Warming:

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972….

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the
“subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to
learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see
those lessons set out with painful clarity.

If one wanted to understand the root of my contempt for scientists and scientistry, as opposed to my mere opposition to their pseudo-scientific policies, it can be summarized by Darwall’s statement about their “cultural aversion to
learning from the past”.

Scientody is a powerful tool. But history is an even more useful and reliable one with regards to humanity. Because, a few genetic alterations over time notwithstanding, Man remains Man and human nature remains human nature.

Science and raciss Africans

It’s telling how SWPLs decry whites who are openly less than enthusiastic about mudsharks, but tend to remain entirely silent concerning blacks who discriminate against other blacks who associate with whites in any way:

A new study of 212 black college students made available to Secrets found little open-mindedness: Blacks don’t like it when other blacks associate with whites, to the point of refusing help to an African-American experiencing “a run of bad luck” — just because they have white friends.

The study in the April edition of the authoritative journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found the so-called “black code” alive and kicking, prompting blacks far more than whites to frown on one of their own if they associate with the other race.

And it is particularly ironic that it is most often those who insist that the natural world is all there is and subscribe to the theory of evolution by natural selection who are most upset by the logically inevitable preference of one distinct population sub-species for its own kind in preference to the members of other sub-species that have evolved differently.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the “black code”, as it is not only scientifically logical, but is precisely the sort of thing that the Constitutional right of free association is designed to protect.

The end of the free love era

As socionomics predicts, with economic contraction comes war… and disease:

The CDC has issued a report detailing its findings in attempting to trace the increasing difficulty in treating gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that can cause severe discomfort, serious medical problems (such as sterility) for both genders and in very rare cases, death.

Gonorrhea is a bacterial disease that has been around for thousands of years, if not longer, plaguing human populations. In more recent times, it’s had to evolve to survive as humans learned to treat it using penicillin and other antibacterial agents. Over the past thirty years in particular, gonorrhea has evolved to the point that there are very few treatments left (ceftriaxone along with either azithromycin or doxycycline) and now, it looks like its poised to get the best of those as well, which will mean those who contract the disease in the very near future will find that doctors have no way to cure them…. The overriding conclusion of the researchers is that the world is now sitting on the precipice of losing the ability to fight a major bacterial infection.

AIDS was the warning and the medical and political establishments completely failed in their responsibilities in the face of the gay community acting up. One sincerely hopes they will do better the next time around. Because the next time does not appear to be very far off.

The posturing of the fetishist

Maddox quite rightly skewers the public posturing of the faux science fans, most of whom can’t even differentiate between science proper and political propaganda:

Any time I see people on Facebook simultaneously liking “iCarly, One Direction” and “The Pauly D Project” while also liking fucking loving science, it raises some red flags. The problem is, people who claim to “fucking love” science don’t. They don’t even like science, let alone “fucking love it.” Want proof? Here are two posts from IFLS. On the left is a typical post, and on the right, a rare scientific post. Note the number of “likes” each post received….

People love science in the same way they love classical music or art. Science and “geeky” subjects are perceived as being hip, cool and intellectual. So people take a passing interest just long enough to glom onto these labels and call themselves “geeks” or “nerds” every chance they get.

 It’s impossible to argue with his logic: “If you ‘fucking love science’, why don’t you do some?”

I also found the incipient cult of the midwitted junior co-signer Neil deGrasse Tyson to be interesting, mostly for the insipid and inadvertently revealing banalities he utters:


“One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.”

I’ll ignore the ironic bait of the obvious and customary oxymoron involved and observe that it should be no surprise that Tyson harbors considerable appeal for the less intelligent. This is a literal paean to cluelessness. Don’t understand X in the slightest? That’s just an indication of how open-minded and progressive you are!

“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”

Judging by Tyson and his observed historical illiteracy, it works about as well as the MMR vaccine on a highly allergic child who ends up in a post-jab coma as his parents are financially compensated by VAERS.

“Not only are we in the Universe the Universe is in us. I don’t know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.”

Ah, the profound depths of Deepak Chopra lite. Again, this is a literal paean to cluelessness; Tyson is openly confessing to his own ignorance of spirituality. How fortunate that it indicates his openness to new ideas. All of this is simple religion-substitute, which is explains how Tyson has become the new softer and cuddlier Dawkins-replacement that Peter Boghossian wanted to be.

The mysteries of TENS

Dr. James M. Tour of Rice University confesses he simply cannot grasp what everyone at Scienceblogs and the Panda’s Thumb and Richarddawkins.net just knows to be true. Because science.

I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.

But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.

The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.

Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.

I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.”

Smells like quality science. And before the usual science fetishists leap in to assert the obvious and declare: “yeah, well, that doesn’t prove God exists,” I will readily admit that it does not. But, (and here is the point), it does prove that there are very rational reasons to doubt the unevidenced assertion that “evolution is a fact”.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, I am an evolution skeptic, not an evolution denier. I do not judge the truth of the belief by the behavior of the believer, although if I did, the behavior of the evolutionary true believers would be sufficient to convince me that the existence of unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns combined is considerably more likely than fish magically turning into monkeys over time due to beneficial mutations taking advantage of the multitude of changes in the water.

There is no “ADHD”

A doctor with more than 50 years of medical practice asserts that ADHD is an umbrella of symptoms, not a disease in itself. And he also declares that the treatment can be considerably worse than many of the underlying causes.

Back in the Seventies, I believed in ADHD. It seemed to explain the attention issues that affected so many children. But over the years I’ve come to realise that the symptoms actually had a whole range of underlying causes that were being ignored because of the knee-jerk diagnosis of ADHD. As I argue in my new book on the subject – which has generated a furious controversy in America, where I work as a behavioural neurologist – we’ve become stuck in a cycle of misdiagnosis of ADHD and over-prescription of stimulants such as Ritalin. Only by properly investigating, identifying and treating these causes can we help our patients.

In the case of the 13-year-old boy, I ordered a series of blood tests. These showed he had an iron deficiency: after school, while his mother was out at work, he binged on junk food that was high in sugar but low in iron.

Iron deficiency (anaemia) causes physical fatigue, poor attention and concentration, and memory problems. As soon as his iron intake improved, with iron pills and more fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts, his performance and behaviour improved hugely, too.

The ADHD diagnosis and the stimulants had masked the real problem, as is so often the case. In France, a study in 2004 found 84 per cent of children diagnosed with ADHD were iron deficient, compared with 18 per cent of ‘non-ADHD’ children. Yet time and time again, doctors miss the real problems – some serious, some easily correctable – by automatically reaching for the ADHD label.

In my book, I identify more than 20 causes of the symptoms that are called ADHD…. Many ADHD patients have other conditions, such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These are said to ‘co-exist’ with ADHD, but in my view they’re the actual cause of the ‘ADHD’ symptoms. Treat them and you will treat the ADHD.

Failing to treat them and pumping the patient with stimulants instead only makes things worse. The side-effects of stimulants include reduced appetite (dangerous for children, who need a good diet), sleep disturbance (tiredness can exacerbate attention problems), anxiety, irritability, depressed moods, delayed puberty and, in adults, sexual problems (such as erectile dysfunction). And long-term use of stimulants makes people resistant to them, meaning they need higher and higher doses. The drugs can damage memory and concentration, and have even been linked to reduced life expectancy and suicide. Yet stimulants are being prescribed more and more frequently, creating a health time bomb and neglecting the real causes of the problems.

A seven-year-old girl was brought to me because she was disruptive in class, fidgeted and talked loudly. She had been diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Adderall (similar to Ritalin), but it caused sleeping problems that made her more disruptive.

I had her eyesight tested and she was found to be significantly near-sighted: her disruptive behaviour in class stemmed from boredom, brought about by the fact she could not see the board properly. Once she was given glasses, her behaviour improved almost overnight. She no longer had ‘ADHD’ – or rather, she never had it in the first place. Similarly, many ‘distracted’ children who stare out of the window, are, in fact, suffering from eye strain and need glasses, not stimulants.

No one has ever believed that having little kids snort cocaine and smoke meth was a good idea. So how did anyone ever come to buy into the idiot concept that giving them speed was medically sound?

I always considered “ADHD” to be complete BS. One boy with a supposed case of it was magically cured and never had any trouble controlling his behavior around me after I picked him up by the throat and told him that if he ever kicked me again, I’d rip his balls off and feed them to him.

Computer-generated science

In fairness, the fraudulent science papers were no less rubbish than most of the stuff being published by human scientists these days:

Computer
scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France,
spent two years examining published research papers, and found that
computer-generated papers made it into more than 30 conferences, and
over 120 have been published by academic publishing houses — over 100 by
the the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and 16
by Springer.

The papers were generated by a piece of
free software called SCIgen, developed in 2005 by scientists at MIT.
SCIgen randomly generates nonsense papers, complete with graphs,
diagrams and citations, and its purpose was to demonstrate how easily
conferences accept meaningless submissions.

Actually,
in light of how they demonstrated that peer review is a completely
ineffective filter and “published science” is no indication that it is
even non-fiction, let alone reflective of actual science, one can
reasonably argue that the computer gibberish was of considerably more
scientific utility than the average science publication.

At this point, it’s simply laughable that anyone even dares appeal to science anymore, let alone “scientific consensus”.

That’s not funny!

Scientists are gradually beginning to discover that progressives are, as the rest of us have known for decades, essentially humorless:

While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study. (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

Actually, it’s not quite true to say that progressives are completely humorless. They do enjoy one single joke that they repeat over and over again, in a myriad of variants.

“That X, he sure is stupid, isn’t he!”

It’s such a great joke because it works for everyone. They should have tried these three jokes on the progressives in the study:

A) George Bush is so stupid, he is really dumb!” (hilarity ensues)

B) Ronald Reagan is so stupid, he forgot he was senile! (a wave of laughter)

C) Barack Obama is so stupid, he married a Klingon! (stone cold silence)

What passes for progressive humor isn’t actually humor per se, it is merely group reinforcement behavior.  It’s how the rabbits police the bounds of what is, and what is not, currently deemed acceptable to the warren. And speaking of humor,  there are few things funnier than seeing the expression on the face of a progressive who hasn’t realized that the borders have been moved again tell a “joke” that is based on the previously defined limits, waiting expectantly for his endorphin rush of group approval, and then failing to receive it.

On the Tierney jokes, I’d rate them 7, 1, 4.