Tag: science

The NYT dips a toe into HBD

Steve Sailer observes that the lead science writer at the New York Times is flirting with dropping the seventh veil of science:

Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.

Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.

Interesting to see it stated so clearly: “the consensus view cannot be right”. I imagine we’re going to be seeing that phrase on a regular basis over the next few years. Let’s list a few of the obvious candidates:

Racial equality (check)
Global warming
String theory
Evolution by natural selection
Neo-Keynesian economics
Monetarism
Sexual equality

Which one do you think will survive longest? I’m going to go with Neo-Keynesian economics. I bet they’ll be able to retrofit debt in there just well enough to remain nominally viable.

A scientist admits science corruption

And attacks the major science publications, or what he calls the “luxury journals”:

I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great
things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives.
The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement
mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best.
Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I
have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our
profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

We
all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking.
The incentives my colleagues face are not huge bonuses, but the
professional rewards that accompany publication in prestigious journals –
chiefly Nature, Cell and Science….

It is the quality of the science, not the journal’s brand, that
matters. Most importantly of all, we scientists need to take action.
Like many successful researchers, I have published in the big brands,
including the papers that won me the Nobel prize for medicine, which I
will be honoured to collect tomorrow.. But no longer. I have now
committed my lab to avoiding luxury journals, and I encourage others to
do likewise.

It should be interesting to see if the science fetishists who attack me for being “anti-science” when I point out the many problems with the science industry will do the same to this Nobel prize-winner.

This is one aspect of the problems I have been pointing out. One doesn’t have to know ANYTHING about science to know that the incentive system will lead to major problems, one only has to know about the existence of the incentives and been in contact with the occasional human being.

The cost of superficial metrics

It’s no wonder that academia has been on the intellectual decline for decades. Publish or perish is a ludicrous way to judge people, especially when there is absolutely no quality control for publishing other than a mutual back-scratching system.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Furthermore, think about what sort of people are perfectly happy to spend their time jumping through stupid, irrelevant hoops in the place of doing anything substantial.  Credentialism and monolithic left-wing bias are not the only problems plaguing the intellectual world today.

On the other hand, Higgs does sound rather like a lazy, nasty old man, so perhaps getting rid of him after he published in 1964 paper wouldn’t have been the worst idea.

The outdated Neo-Darwinists

As usual, I appear to be well in advance of the scientists. Isn’t it simply astonishing that a non-scientist can so readily and reliably predict the inaccuracy and unreliability of the current scientific consensus? How is that even theoretically possible? How can ignorance trump credentials and actual science education? And yet….

In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.

The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.

There isn’t a mystery here. The TENS true believers keep thinking that genetics will color in the lines of their rudimentary evolution-based models, but instead, the science keeps breaking their lines. All of the conceptual models are wrong. Pretty much all of the carefully calculated timelines are wrong. Evolution by natural selection is a red herring of a theory that was developed at a time when the scientific tools were crude and largely unscientific. So, it should be absolutely no surprise that the improved data being provided by advancements in genetic science is repeatedly overturning the conclusions that were previously reached.

““This would not have been possible even a year ago,” said Juan Luis
Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a
co-author of the paper. Finding such ancient human DNA was a major advance, said David Reich, a
geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the
research. “That’s an amazing, game-changing thing,” he said.”

The game will change, but it will take time. I am aware that most scientists are still holding firmly to the natural selection model. This, too, is as expected, as per Kuhn. We’ll have to wait until all the Dawkinses and Myerses die off before geneticists with a sufficiently open mind can throw out the theory altogether. As it happens, they’re already beginning to throw out Mr. Dawkins’s signature concept:

Mendel didn’t expose the physical gene, of course (that would come a
century later), but the conceptual gene. And this conceptual gene,
revealed in the tables and calculations of this math-friendly monk,
seemed an agent of mathematical neatness. Mendel’s thousands of
crossings showed that the traits he studied — smooth skin versus
wrinkled, for instance, or purple flower versus white — appeared or
disappeared in consistent ratios dictated by clear mathematical
formulas. Inheritance appeared to work like algebra. Anything so
math-friendly had to be driven by discrete integers.
It was beautiful work. Yet when Mendel first published his findings in 1866, just seven years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,
no one noticed. Starting in 1900, however, biologists rediscovering his
work began to see that these units of heredity he’d discovered — dubbed
genes in 1909 — filled a crucial gap in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This recognition was the Holy Shit! moment that launched genetics’ Holy Shit! century. It seemed to explain everything. And it saved Darwin.

Darwin had legitimised evolution by proposing for it a viable
mechanism — natural selection, in which organisms with the most
favourable traits survive and multiply at higher rates than do others.
But he could not explain what created or altered traits. Mendel could. Genes created traits, and both would spread through a
population if a gene created a trait that survived selection….

These days, Dawkins makes the news so often for buffoonery that some might wonder how he ever became so celebrated. The Selfish Gene
is how. To read this book is to be amazed, entertained, transported.
For instance, when Dawkins describes how life might have begun — how a
randomly generated strand of chemicals pulled from the ether could
happen to become a ‘replicator’, a little machine that starts to build
other strands like itself, and then generates organisms to carry it — he
creates one of the most thrilling stretches of explanatory writing ever
penned. It’s breathtaking.

Dawkins assembles genetics’ dry materials and abstract maths into a
rich but orderly landscape through which he guides you with grace,
charm, urbanity, and humour. He replicates in prose the process he
describes. He gives agency to chemical chains, logic to confounding
behaviour. He takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it almost
impossible to misunderstand. He reveals the gene as not just the centre
of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour. By the
time you’ve finished his book, or well before that, Dawkins has made of
the tiny gene — this replicator, this strip of chemicals little more
than an abstraction — a huge, relentlessly turning gearwheel of steel,
its teeth driving smaller cogs to make all of life happen. It’s a
gorgeous argument. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits,
it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple.

Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and others, it’s wrong.

The best part of all this is that Dawkins clearly knows it’s wrong too. Not that he’s going to admit it, though, not yet.

I phoned Richard Dawkins to see what he thought of all this. Did
genes follow rather than lead? I asked him specifically about whether
processes such as gene accommodation might lead instead. Then he did
something so slick and wonderful I didn’t quite realise what he’d done
till after we hung up: he dismissed genetic accommodation… by
accommodating it. Specifically, he said that genetic accommodation
doesn’t really change anything, because since the gene ends up locking
in the change and carrying it forward, it all comes back to the gene
anyway.

‘This doesn’t modify the gene-centric model at all,’ he said. ‘The
gene-centric model is all about the gene being the unit in the hierarchy
of life that is selected. That remains the gene.’

‘He’s backfilling,’ said West-Eberhard. ‘He and others have long been
arguing for the primacy of an individual gene that creates a trait that
either survives or doesn’t.’

They backtest and they backfill. That’s due to the crumbling state of TENS. They’re still clinging to natural selection, of course. But the TENS model is in crisis and it will collapse soon enough. It is even beginning to look as if we may get to see it happen in our lifetimes. Gene expression is more compatible with Intelligent Design than with TENS. We are not evolved, we are created. DNA is our C++ equivalent, and the womb is our compiler. Compile it differently, get different results. This is not New Age mumbo jumbo, but a scientific hypothesis that will be testable once we understand it well enough to become proficient in programming it ourselves.

We have an answer

The Chateau’s response to the brain study is about as calm and understated as one would expect….

As is so often the case, though, there is something hard and logical beneath the savage provocation. I very strongly suspect, as, I think, Heartiste does as well, that the wiring of Gamma brains will show up differently on brain scans than other male brains.

Here is my scientific hypothesis: The reason Gamma male thought processes and conclusions tend have more in common with female thought processes and conclusions than with normal male thought processes and conclusions is because they have more of the inter-hemisphere connections and less of the intra-hemisphere connections than normal men.

Sex differences are hard-wired

This research on brain connections won’t come as any surprise to anyone who isn’t ideologically bound to the idea that sex differences are cultural, but it should suffice to explode any last vestiges of biology-based sexual equalitarianism:

“What we’ve identified is that, when looked at in groups, there are
connections in the brain that are hardwired differently in men and
women. Functional tests have already shown than when they carry out
certain tasks, men and women engage different parts of the brain,”
Professor Verma said.

The research was carried out on 949
individuals – 521 females and 428 males – aged between 8 and 22. The
brain differences between the sexes only became apparent after
adolescence, the study found.

A special brain-scanning technique
called diffusion tensor imaging, which can measure the flow of water
along a nerve pathway, established the level of connectivity between
nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a neural map of the brain
called the “connectome”, Professor Verma said.

“It tells you
whether one region of the brain is physically connected to another part
of the brain and you can get significant differences between two
populations,” Professor Verma said. “In women most of the
connections go between left and right across the two hemispheres while
in men most of the connections go between the front and the back of the
brain,” she said.

Because the female connections link the left
hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right,
which is linked with intuition, this could help to explain why women
tend to do better than men at intuitive tasks, she added.

It’s amusing how they can’t help but describe their findings in a futile attempt to appeal to women rather than to offend them. It’s not the map-reading that is relevant; the real takeaway here is that women are less logical on average because their right hemisphere interferes with the ability of their left hemisphere to logically process information. It’s never been any secret that women are less logical; among other things, that’s why women weren’t permitted to vote in the first place. But now, thanks to science, we are beginning to understand that limits such as these weren’t set out of simple prejudice, but rather out of the straightforward desire for societal self-preservation.

And, as the consequences have demonstrated, the West violated those limits at its peril, a mistake for which we are all, men and women alike, paying the price.

It should be fascinating to see what happens when similar studies begin providing unavoidable scientific explanations for the differences between various human population groups that everyone observes, but affects to either deny or explain away.

Fear of the hand that feeds

The fact that government bureaucrats are literally silencing scientists doesn’t appear to bother science fetishists anywhere nearly as much as the idea that somewhere, someone has a textbook with an evolution sticker on it.

Hundreds of federal scientists said in a survey that they had been asked to exclude or alter technical information in government documents for non-scientific reasons, and thousands said they had been prevented from responding to the media or the public.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), which commissioned the survey from Environics Research “to gauge the scale and impact of ‘muzzling’ and political interference among federal scientists,” released the results Monday at a news conference. PIPSC represents 60,000 public servants across the country, including 20,000 scientists, in federal departments and agencies, including scientists involved in food and consumer product safety and environmental monitoring.

In all, the union sent invitations to participate in the survey to 15,398 federal scientists in June. A total of 4,069 responded.

Twenty four per cent of respondents said they “sometimes” or “often” were asked to exclude or alter technical information in federal government documents for non-scientific reasons. Most often, the request came from their direct supervisors, followed by business or industry, other government departments, politically appointed staff and public interest advocates.

He that pays the gold makes the rules. Science prostituted itself when it got in bed with government and now it has to pay the price. Big science is bad science.

The comparative danger of eating disorders

It’s fascinating how “eating disorder” as it is conventionally used doesn’t appear to cover the statistically most dangerous health consequence of eating abnormally. And, for some reason, in an overstuffed society we’re supposed to worry about the women who are too skinny:

A “disease” that affects 30 million people and kills one out of every 206,897 of the individuals who contract it is simply not a serious societal problem, especially not when considered in light of how diabetes contributed to 231,404 deaths in 2011. 28.5 million Americans suffer from diabetes, so the risk of death from diabetes is one in 111. That means the risk of dying from diabetes is 1,855 TIMES HIGHER than the risk of dying from an eating disorder.

Stuff that in your piehole, fatty. Better yet, stick your finger down your throat if you want to live… and that’s not even considering amputations, blindness, and other non-fatal complications.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Nature on science fraud

Even the mainstream journals are being forced to tacitly admit that science skeptics are justified in their skepticism about modern professional science:

Retractions of scientific papers have increased about tenfold during the past decade, with many studies crumbling in cases of high-profile research misconduct that ranges from plagiarism to image manipulation to outright data fabrication. When worries about somebody’s work reach a critical point, it falls to a peer, supervisor, junior partner or uninvolved bystander to decide whether to keep mum or step up and blow the whistle. Doing the latter comes at significant risk, and the path is rarely simple. Some make their case and move on; others never give up. And in what seems to be a growing trend, anonymous watchdogs are airing their concerns through e-mail and public forums.

The reason that the watchdogs have to be anonymous is because scientists are far less amenable to having their mistakes exposed than most people are capable of imagining and the secular priesthood reliably retaliates against those who pull back the curtain on the myth.

Mailvox: a more reasonable vaccine schedule

CM asks what is a more reasonable vaccine schedule than the current US one:

I have followed your blog for quite some time now and have come to really value your opinion on a wide variety of topics. I recently had my first child and my wife and I have already resolved to home school (largely because we looked into a lot of the information that you discussed on your blog). I want to know what in your opinion would be the ideal alternative vaccine schedule.

The first thing is to understand that many European and Asian doctors think the US schedule is insane. Don’t be moved by the rhetorical appeals to the US medical industry; remember the same people are also telling you to fill up on carbohydrates and fructose to lose weight. The second thing is to realize that your primary responsibility is to your children, not to the collective. If something is better for your child than for the community, then you put your child first.

That’s called being a good parent.

Of course, if you are genuinely more concerned about the community, then go ahead and get yourself sterilized. Because global warming or whatever.

Anyhow, in my opinion, no vaccinations need be given until the child is walking. Then the tetanus vaccine is a good idea since tetanus can’t be treated. Polio is probably the next concern, given its seriousness, and should be addressed some time before the child is likely to come into regular contact with large quantities of people.  If you’re homeschooling, this probably means sometime between the ages of three and five.

Due to the potential risk of blindness and the way immigrants and travelers have been spreading it around so freely, measles is probably a good idea around the age of school, so sometime between five and seven. I would recommend a measles-specific vaccine and not MMR; mumps and rubella are much less serious diseases and the rubella vaccine is, as far as I can tell, completely worthless.

Not only is the disease less serious, but I know of several women who have been repeatedly vaccinated for it and still show no evidence of antibodies, hence the repeated vaccinations. If you don’t have pregnant women or infants around, whooping cough is probably not an issue, although it is a real bitch if your children get it. But if you can’t keep your kids home for two to three weeks straight without a problem, then you should probably seriously consider the vaccination around the age of seven.

Vaccines for chicken pox and other non-fatal diseases are a joke. Forget potential reactions, merely driving to the doctor’s office puts your children more at risk than the disease does.  The point is not to avoid all vaccinations entirely, but rather, avoid overloading the very young child’s system. I know vets who refuse to give dogs more than one vaccine at a time due to the negative effects they have observed over the years, so the idea that the current US vaccine schedule can’t possibly be harming children is ludicrous on its face.

As for the inevitable appeals to science, I will merely point out that no science – ZERO – has been done concerning the safety of the current US vaccine schedule. If anyone wishes to dispute that, I invite them to provide everyone here with a link to the published paper. And as for the appeals to the greater good of the collective, I first note that I’ve never been much moved by Leninist arguments, and second, observe that one could just as easily justify murderously culling the immigrant population on that basis.