Tag: science

Belief in God is good for you

As I pointed out five years ago in TIA, the New Atheist attempt to
kick out the supposed crutch of religious faith is not only churlish, it is actively harmful to those individuals who happen to need a crutch in
order to walk through life.

A new study
suggests belief in God may significantly improve the outcome of those
receiving short-term treatment for psychiatric illness. Researchers
followed patients receiving care from a hospital-based behavioral health
program to investigate the relationship between patients’ level of
belief in God, expectations for treatment and actual treatment outcomes.

In
the study, published in the current issue of Journal of Affective
Disorders, researchers comment that people with a moderate to high level
of belief in a higher power do significantly better in short-term
psychiatric treatment than those without.

“Belief was
associated with not only improved psychological well-being, but
decreases in depression and intention to self-harm,” says David H.
Rosmarin, Ph.D., an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School….

Patients with “no” or only “slight” belief in God were twice as
likely not to respond to treatment as patients with higher levels of
belief. Investigators believe the study demonstrates that a belief in God is
associated with improved treatment outcomes in psychiatric care.

It’s
fascinating to see how some atheists believe that Templeton funding
renders a study intrinsically unscientific, while blithely citing
studies funded by Big Pharma to argue for the safety of
government-mandated chemical injections.  All the while ignoring the
disproportionate tendency of atheists to kill themselves and others.

I
suspect it won’t be long before there is additional scientific support
for my hypothesis that atheism is a consequence of a mild form of
autism.

Intelligence and reaction times

I tend to share Steve Sailer’s doubts about Michael Woodley et al’s paper on how reaction times are slower now than when Galton first measured them:

“It was an era of glorious scientific discovery. And the reason for the Victorians unprecedented success is simple – they were ‘substantially cleverer’ than us.  Researchers compared reaction times – a reliable indicator of general
intelligence – since the late 1800s to the present day and found our
fleetness of mind is diminishing. They claim our slowing reflexes suggest we are less smart than our
ancestors, with a loss of 1.23 IQ points per decade or 14 IQ points
since Victorian times. While an average man in 1889 had a reaction time of 183 milliseconds, this has slowed to 253ms in 2004. They found the same case with women, whose speed deteriorated from 188 to 261ms in the same period.” 

Back in the 1990s, I read up on Arthur Jensen’s research on his reaction
time experiments, and … I don’t know. It seemed very, very
complicated, even more complicated than reading Jensen on IQ.

How about me? I’m a reasonably intelligent person. Do I have good reaction times? In general, I’d say no.

I’m more than a bit dubious about this correlation between reaction time and intelligence myself.  While on the one hand, I am highly intelligent and have excellent reaction times – I’m a former NCAA D1 100m sprinter and can still outsprint most men 15 years younger –  on the other, I remember the sprinters against whom I ran.  Let’s just say many of them were not likely to be confused with rocket scientists.

Then again, I have no problem believing that the Victorian English were considerably brighter, on average, than the modern American.  A simple comparison of popular novels, then and now, should suffice to prove that.

The scientific consensus is clear

Of course, it also happens to be totally incorrect:

Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee, said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.  Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent agree human activities are causing the planet to warm.

I just like to get these things down before the scientists start whitewashing the record again.

So much for the “science” of global warming

Once more, it is seen that it is the skeptics who were correct and the “scientists” who had their arrogant, pointy heads up their asses:

The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.

Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.

The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed…. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”

That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.

Who would have ever imagined that it was the giant flaming ball of nuclear fire in the sky, the one that provides the Earth with the vast majority of its heat, that is the controlling factor concerning global temperatures?  What an outlandish notion!

Keep in mind that the scientists who tell you evolution by natural selection is a fact are, in some cases, the very same people who told you global warming was a fact.  In both cases, what they are relying on is far from science.

The secret of the Moon water

It came from Earth:

The latest results come from studies on the most extraordinary samples hauled back from the moon, including green-tinged stone collected by Apollo 15 in 1971, and orange material gathered by Apollo 17 in 1972.

The surprise discovery of the green rock, by Commander Dave Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin, sparked a lengthy debate among the astronauts about the boulder’s true colour while Nasa controllers listened in.

Scientists focused on tiny droplets of volcanic glass that were trapped in crystals inside the rocks. The crystals protected the droplets from the violence of eruption, and so preserved in them a snapshot of the moon’s ancient interior.

Researchers found evidence for water inside the glass droplets in earlier work but the latest study goes further, showing that the lunar water is chemically identical to that on ancient Earth.

So, now we know that the water in the Moon rocks came from Earth.  And we already knew that the Moon rocks came from Earth.  At what point is it going to become sufficiently obvious that the “Moon landings” were filmed on Earth?

What more is required, signed confessions from Stanley Kubrick and Neil Armstrong?

There is no scientific evidence that Man landed on the Moon, after all.  Since the scientific evidence points quite clearly to the various “lunar” objects having a terrestrial origin, then must we not, as good rational scientific materialists, conclude that Man never landed on the Moon?

Science vs Science(TED)

Apparently science is not science unless it is approved by TED’s board:

After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhitechapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel.

We’re not censoring the talks. Instead we’re placing them here, where they can be framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the factual problems with their arguments. See both talks after the jump.

All talks on the TEDxTalks channel represent the opinion of the speaker, not of TED or TEDx, but we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.

It is very difficult to try to consider the idea that most of the TED Talks are not pseudoscience with a straight face.  The entire purpose of the TED Talks is to make that which is not science look and feel like science for the benefit of the self-consciously mid-witted.  There is a reason the Ted Talks are eight-minute videos; it is a product targeted at people with short attention spans who are more inclined to watch television than read.

In the image on the left, Manolo the Shoe Blogger illustrates for whom these short, lightweight Talks are intended. TED Talks are really nothing more than video Cliff’s Notes. That is why the sort of people who specialize in dumbing things down for the wealthy, half-educated have to be very careful about what ideas they permit to be presented to their target audience.  They know perfectly well that their audience are the exact opposite of critical thinkers and therefore have a tendency to swallow everything presented to them as the pure truth of the sciencistic gospel.

The banned talk is below.  The fascinating thing is one of the reasons for the ban which is that Sheldrake “suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness.” So, are we to understand that the scientific materialists now not only accept that consciousness exists, but regard it as the orthodox and enforceable scientific consensus?

The business of progressive science

The Left is forever attempting to cloak its evil lunacies in the veil of scientific authority.  It has been doing so since Marx first claimed his socialism was “scientific”. That is why they so ferociously defend St. Darwin and his holy theorum, why they try to portray political opposition as mental illness, and why, in the end, so many of the scientific studies to which they point turn out to be pure fabrications.

Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of
several well-regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. That
spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an
experiment done at the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled
environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. And
just days earlier, he received more media attention for a study
indicating that eating meat made people selfish and less social….

Stapel’s fraud may shine a spotlight on dishonesty in science, but
scientific fraud is hardly new. The rogues’ gallery of academic liars
and cheats features scientific celebrities who have enjoyed similar
prominence. The once-celebrated South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang
Woo Suk stunned scientists in his field a few years ago after it was
discovered that almost all of the work for which he was known was
fraudulent. The prominent Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser
resigned in 2011 during an investigation by the Office of Research
Integrity at the Department of Health and Human Services that would end
up determining that some of his papers contained fabricated data. 
Every year, the Office of Research Integrity uncovers numerous
instances­ of bad behavior by scientists, ranging from lying on grant
applications to using fake images in publications. A blog called Retraction Watch
publishes a steady stream of posts about papers being retracted by
journals because of allegations or evidence of misconduct. 
Each case of research fraud that’s uncovered triggers a similar response
from scientists. First disbelief, then anger, then a tendency to
dismiss the perpetrator as one rotten egg in an otherwise-honest
enterprise. But the scientific misconduct that has come to light in
recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in
science isn’t as insignificant as many would like to believe. And
considered from a more cynical point of view, figures like Hwang and
Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest
behaviors that extend from the cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen
hypothesis — which many researchers admit is commonplace — to outright
fabrication. Still, the nature and scale of Stapel’s fraud sets him
apart from most other cheating academics. “The extent to which I did it,
the longevity of it, makes it extreme,” he told me. “Because it is not
one paper or 10 but many more.” 
On a Sunday morning, as we drove to a village near Maastricht to see his
parents, Stapel reflected on why his behavior had sparked such outrage
in the Netherlands. “People think of scientists as monks in a monastery
looking out for the truth,” he said. “People have lost faith in the
church, but they haven’t lost faith in science. My behavior shows that
science is not holy.”

What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business.

Science, particularly academic science, is now a big business, and it is an unusually corrupt one that is primarily dependent upon the media and government funding.  It has no practical external limitations upon it holding its businessmen accountable. As Stapel’s example demonstrates, there is absolutely nothing – nothing – reliable about it.  This point should be driven home every single time anyone makes the absurd claim that science is the best, or the only, arbiter of truth and reality.

Here is how bad the corruption is: Stapel was actually teaching a graduate seminar on research ethics. Notice too that all of the established academics who caught wind of the fraud not only looked the other way, but advised others to do so as well.

We have a word for real and genuine science that is reliable enough to be trustworthy.  Engineering.

“At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it.”

West Hunter abuses E.O. Wilson

Solely in the mathematical sense, you understand:

Lord Kelvin said “I often say that when you can measure what you are
speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it;
but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre
and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you
have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science,
whatever the matter may be.”  Even those who didn’t have much math
sometimes wished that they did.  Chuck Darwin said “I have deeply
regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand
something of the great leading principles of mathematics;  for men thus
endowed seem to have an extra sense.”

E. O. Wilson would have benefited from having that extra sense. If he
had it, he might not have suggested that ridiculous “gay uncle” theory,
in which homosexuality pays for itself genetically thru gay men helping
their siblings in ways that produce extra nieces and nephews. First,
that doesn’t even happen – so much for field work.  Second, it’s
impossible.  The relationship coefficients don’t work. Nephews and
nieces are only half as closely related as your own kids, so you’d need
four extra to break even, rather than two, as with your own kids.  Maybe
if Wilson had ever learned to divide by two, he wouldn’t have made this mistake.

Biology and softer-headed sciences such as anthropology are
absolutely rife with innumerates, and there is a cost.  If I hear one
more person say that average growth rates were very low in the old stone
age, a teeny tiny fraction of a percent [true], and so anatomically
modern humans only left Africa after it filled up, which took a hundred
thousand years, I’m gonna scream.  If I hear another anthropologist say
that she could understand how a small group could rapidly expand to fill
New Zealand, but just can’t see how they could fill up the Americas,
whole continents, in a thousand years – lady, they screwed, they had
babies, and they walked.  All it took was a weird, unacademic lifestyle
in which you raised three kids – pretty easy to do in the Happy Hunting
Ground.

This is helpful in illustrating why biologists, as well as science fetishists who harbor blind faith in biologists, shy away from the sort of quantifiable questions I posed to Mike Williamson earlier this week.  It’s true that quantification is not the magical be all and end all; economics is riddled by pseudo-quantifiable fictions that lead to bad theory and even worse policies. But without numbers, there is no precision, and without precision, there is no science, there is only, as Lord Kelvin suggested, the beginning of what could, eventually, become science.

And insofar as it remains unquantifiable and non-numeric, (to say nothing of unfalsifiable), the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection remains a matter of philosophy, not science.

A biologist seeks to dumb down science

This fascinating call to dumb down science by E.O. Wilson not only demonstrates my point about the relative lack of intelligence and intellectual rigor on the part of biologists, but is particularly untimely given the recent relevations concerning the economic work of some famous, and apparently similarly limited economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear
is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in
the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the
most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more
than semiliterate.

Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.

During
my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright
undergraduates turned away from the possibility of a scientific career,
fearing that, without strong math skills, they would fail. This mistaken
assumption has deprived science of an immeasurable amount of sorely
needed talent. It has created a hemorrhage of brain power we need to
stanch.

Now, why would we need to stanch a hemorrhage of demonstrably inferior brains?  And how bright could those undergraduates be if they were not capable of the math? Wilson clearly not only isn’t mathematically more than semiliterate, (which TIA readers will note is something I previously observed about Richard Dawkins as well), he also doesn’t understand the current state of supply and demand in his field.  We already have far more biologists than even the currently inflated state of higher education can support.

The fact that E.O. Wilson is considered a great scientist isn’t an indication that biology doesn’t need mathematically adept individuals, it is an indictment of biology and its butterfly collectors.  While it is true that higher math is not always required, the panoply of mathematical, statistical, and logical errors riddling his field demonstrates that, at the very least, biology could use more people who are at least capable of mastering calculus, not less.

Wilson’s article is particularly amusing in light of Mike Williamson’s claim of the intellectual inferiority of “creationtards”.  I have a homeschooled kid of junior high school age who is already more mathematically advanced than one of the most famous scientific advocates of TE(p)NS was when he was in his thirties and a tenured professor at Harvard.

While it is true that exceptional mathematical skills are not required for formulating scientific hypotheses, they serve as a reasonable proxy for intelligence, and that is necessary for both formulating the hypotheses as well as designing legitimate tests for them.  Wilson himself notes that the “annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that either can be safely ignored or, when tested, fail.” The same is true of economics, and it is a direct result of insufficient intelligence – or more ominously, insufficient integrity – being used in the construction and testing of those models.

Of course, it surely doesn’t help that many, if not most, of those models are conceptually based on the philosophical argument known as “natural selection”.  One would think that the very high failure rate would cause Wilson to at least consider the possibility that the conceptual framework is false, but then, as we can reasonably surmise, logic is not his strong point.

One wonders if it is conceivable that the real reason Wilson wants less intelligent students studying biology is because that is the only way evolutionists will be able to continue indoctrinating undergraduates with the Neo-Darwinian theory in the future without it raising too many awkward questions in their minds.

Mailvox: rhetoric is not science

Michael Z. Williamson takes a page from the true faithful of global warming and Keynesian economics by attempting to defend what is supposed to pass for science with pure rhetoric:

Watching Creationists criticize evolutionary theory is like watching the Brady Bunch criticize the Heller Decision. It would be cute if they didn’t take themselves so seriously, and pose a serious threat to society.

What I find amusing about this is that I was an evolutionary skeptic long before I was a Christian.  And one of the primary reasons I was a skeptic is because as absurd as some of the arguments presented by the creationists struck me, no evolutionist ever demonstrated an ability to address the questions posed to them.  Instead, they always – always – attempted to discuss the Book of Genesis, the age of the Earth, Christianity, the public school system, or some other topic totally unrelated to the one at hand.

That is why I am still a skeptic concerning the secularism’s epic myth, despite having read every book ever published by Richard Dawkins, despite having read Wilson, and Gould, and Shermer, and Hauser, and a number of other well-regarded evolutionary popularizers.  At this point, it might be more accurate to say I am an evolutionary skeptic because I have read those books and been astounded by the obvious logical flaws, evasions, and handwaving that I have encountered in them.

But since Mike is a Standout Author, and therefore capable of exceeding the customary limitations of discussion point-repeating progressives, I assume he is able to rise above the mere rhetoric and actually defend evolutionary theory.  Let’s find out by asking him six simple questions that should be no problem for any man with a solid grasp of the subject.

  1. How do creationists “pose a serious threat to society”?
  2. There are an estimated 1,263,186 animal species and 326,175 plant species in the world.  Assuming the age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years, what is the average rate of speciation?
  3. How many mutations, on average, are required per speciation?
  4. What scientifically significant predictive model relies primarily upon evolution by natural selection?
  5. Which of the various human sub-species is the most evolved; i.e. modified by mutation and natural selection from the most recent common human ancestor? Which is the least evolved?
  6. Is the theory of evolution by natural selection strengthened or weakened by the claim that most DNA is devoid of purpose?

And Stickwick, who happens to be both a Christian and a physicist, beat me to showing how Mike’s attempt to tar all religious people as simplistic binary thinkers was not only demonstrably false, but amusingly inept:

One of the (many) major problems with religion is that its followers insist there has to be a right and wrong answer, and only one of each.

2 + X = (more than 5). Solve for X. One answer only, please.

“There is only one answer: X > 3. Every other possible answer is wrong: it’s not X = 3 and it’s not X < 3.

It’s
absurd to point to our limited understanding of nature and say that
since one person had it partially right and someone else had it
partially right, therefore there is more than one answer. You don’t know
that. And you’ll be hard pressed to build a convincing case, let alone
prove, that there is ultimately more than one right answer to something.
Science doesn’t proceed that way. Also, since when have religious
people insisted there is only one wrong answer?”

Mr. Williamson, with all due respect, you don’t appear to realize that you are not only dealing with a number of people here who are smarter than you are, but are also better educated in science than you are. It may help to keep in mind that at Vox Popoli, those who live by the rhetoric tend to die quickly and brutally by the dialectic.

Here the rhetoric is only used to dance on the grave afterward.