Tag: science

I see a fraud

Serial global warming scammer Michael Mann calls for the politicization of science:

It
is not an uncommon view among scientists that we potentially compromise
our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters or the
societal implications of our work. And it would be problematic if our
views on policy somehow influenced the way we went about doing our
science. But there is nothing inappropriate at all about drawing on our
scientific knowledge to speak out about the very real implications of
our research.

My
colleague Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who died in 2010,
used to say that being a scientist-advocate is not an oxymoron. Just
because we are scientists does not mean that we should check our
citizenship at the door of a public meeting, he would explain. The New
Republic once called him a “scientific pugilist” for advocating a
forceful approach to global warming. But fighting for scientific truth
and an informed debate is nothing to apologize for.

If
scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum
that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short-term
self-interest. There is a great cost to society if scientists fail to
participate in the larger conversation — if we do not do all we can to
ensure that the policy debate is informed by an honest assessment of the
risks. In fact, it would be an abrogation of our responsibility to
society if we remained quiet in the face of such a grave threat.

Actually, I welcome this development. It should completely destroy whatever vestiges of respect the average man holds for scientists. I mean, for a scientist who makes his living selling global warming in return for research grants to openly claim that it is a problem for those with short-term self-interests to engage in the public debate, well, we’re clearly not dealing with rocket scientists here.

Every time an idiot “climate scientist” calls for socialism in the name of science, a little more unwarranted regard for science is lost. And this is before the inevitable announcement that Mann and the 97 percent of climate scientists are shown conclusively to be wrong and the “fringe minority of our populace” is proven that its rejection of their consensus was not, in fact, irrational, but correct.

Unlike the socialists, the global warmists don’t have 100 years to obfuscate and explain away their failures. They have 10 more years, 20 at most. And we can hope, by then, that “because science” will have become irrevocably tarnished to the point that it is recognized as the logical fallacy it is.

More highly evolved

It should be interesting to see how those who are true believers in both a) the religion of TENS and b) the myth of human equality react to this scientific claim from Penn State that Africans are less evolved than Europeans:

Light skin in Europeans stems from a gene mutation from a single person who lived 10,000 years ago. This is according to a new U.S. study that claims the colour is due to an ancient ancestor who lived somewhere between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Scientists made the discovery after identifying a key gene that contributes to lighter skin colour in Europeans.

In earlier research, Keith Cheng from Penn State College of Medicine reported that one amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is a key contributor to the skin colour difference between Europeans and West Africans. ‘The mutation in SLC24A5 changes just one building block in the protein, and contributes about a third of the visually striking differences in skin tone between peoples of African and European ancestry,’ he said.

We already know that the three major continental groups are not even equally human on the genetic level, with Africans being the only pure homo sapiens sapiens. This new claim indicates that Africans are lower in the evolutionary order, not that the skin color gene can be described as a speciation event. Regardless, one wonders why those who stubbornly, and ignorantly, continue to insist on human equality despite these undeniable genetic differences which are much more than skin deep are not yet tarred by the label “science denier”.

What I find amusing is that the scientists have already leaped in with some strained explanations to cram natural selection into the process when it is very clear from modern human behavior that the rapidity of the growth of the mutation would much more likely have stemmed from sexual selection. There need not be any environmental advantage to lighter skin for it to be preferred. Of course, that would also be a hate fact, as it would be scientific evidence that whites are more attractive than blacks. That being said, a fact is a fact.

However, that’s not the intriguing stuff. Here’s a much more interesting thought. The 10,000 year time frame is not all that far off from Bishop Usher’s famous 6,000 year estimation for the Age of the Earth. But most forget that the bishop’s estimate was based on Adam, not the Earth. So, what if it can eventually be determined that the single genetic mutation was actually an artificial one? That would certainly set the cat among the equality pigeons.

Scientific evidence that gays can be cured

It’s not really a matter for debate anymore. It is eminently obvious that gays can be cured, and cure themselves, of their same-sex sexual orientations. Setting aside the obvious anecdotal examples, such as the new First Lady of New York City, the mutable nature of sexual orientation is statistically undeniable:

A controversial new study argues that a host of research on gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers could be based on faulty data because of confused teens and “jokesters” who later said they were straight.

The report focuses on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey that followed a nationally representative group of tens of thousands of teens into adulthood. Add Health, as it is known, is considered one of the most important sources of data on the lives of young people, including those who are gay, lesbian and bisexual.

What caught the attention of Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor at Cornell University, was the fact that more than 70% of the teens who said they had ever had a “romantic attraction” to someone of the same sex later told researchers that they were straight.

Sure, the “jokester” theory is one possible explanation. As is the hoary old “cultural stigma” concept, although that idea looks increasingly shaky as increased media acceptance has produced more gay suicides and other indications of serious psychological problems than the closet ever did. But unless we’re to assume that the vast majority of all self-reported homosexuals are fakes, (which would call into question many assumptions about the size and significance of the homosexual population), we must conclude that most youthful homosexuals eventually grow out of their sexual abnormalities.

Which is entirely understandable. Sex aside, how much Erasure can any man be expected to take?

It is readily observable that there is no such thing as a static sexual abnormality. Was Ian Watkins always a pedophile? Was the thrice-married Meredith Baxter Birney always a lesbian? The dynamic sin model explains observable human behavior rather better than most of the scientific alternatives, particularly the static ones. Regardless, whether it is a simple choice or a curable psychological disorder, the idea that homosexuality is always and necessarily a permanently fixed orientation is demonstrably false. Any homosexual who dares to question this, much less dispute it, must be asked why they deny science. And statistics.

UPDATE: This objection on Twitter made me laugh. Critics, it might help to keep in mind you’re dealing with a superintelligence before you say something stupid, all right? I’m smarter than you are. Just assume that even if you don’t believe it; it may save you some embarrassment. That doesn’t mean I’m always right, it just means that you’re probably wrong.

Buttercup Dew: “Your logic doesn’t follow? I was “bisexual” as a teen, now
unambiguously homosexual. You decided conclusion and worked backwards.”

To which I responded: “No, my logic is correct. You prove the point. The fact of the delta is what matters, not the direction.”

The closing of the scientific mind

David Gelernter has a very good article in Commentary on the descent of science into, if not quite religion, something that is at the very least a distinct and readily identifiable philosophy:

The modern “mind fields” encompass artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Researchers in these fields are profoundly split, and the chaos was on display in the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos in 2012. Nagel is an eminent philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of consciousness—the capacity to feel or experience the world. He then offers his own ideas on consciousness, which are speculative, incomplete, tentative, and provocative—in the tradition of science and philosophy.

Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically) beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught never to forgive. Even worse, Nagel is an atheist unwilling to express sufficient hatred of religion to satisfy other atheists. There is nothing religious about Nagel’s speculations; he believes that science has not come far enough to explain consciousness and that it must press on. He believes that Darwin is not sufficient.

The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable:

“Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.”

It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable response to a mass attack by killer hyenas were to run away. Nagel was assailed; almost everyone else ran.

Science is in desperate need of an intellectual cleansing, a return to the scientific fundamentals of its methodology. Indeed, both Science and Christianity are in much the same boat these days, as both Method and Faith have become corrupted by those who claim to speak in its name.

Mailvox: Atheist Philosophy in action

BH is bemused by a PhD’s resort to an amusing variant of the very atheist logic I mocked six years ago in TIA:

I’ve been parrying on FB with an honest-to-God PhD engineer at IBM who asserts “evolution must be true because GPS works.” His logic: because general relativity is learned from observing the stars, and the stars are billions of years old, therefore evolution is true.

Because I learned to eat crumbs that fall from the table of the most able Internet Cruelty Artist, I’ve been mercilessly pointing out his errors in reasoning, illustrating his absurdities, etc., while laughing at him.  He demanded acceptance with the premise that “ALL science requires that evolution be true.” (He repeated it over and over, comment after comment… gee, Aspergers much?)  So I asked him if my dentist needs to believe in evolution in order to clean my teeth.  ‘Yes, they need to understand that bacteria evolved 500 mya before they can clean teeth.’

I hadn’t personally encountered this level of idiocy before.

As I have occasionally noted, it takes a considerable amount of education to reduce a formerly intelligent individual to the level of a complete idiot. A PhD isn’t absolutely necessary, but it does appear to help. The IBM engineer is merely engaged in the usual bait-and-switch; he’s trying to defend evolution by cloaking it in the protective veil of real science that provides reliable results.

Mailvox: the Flat Gene Society

Physphilmusic inadvertently reveals the inner fascist that lurks within most cultural liberals:

I guess that is the root of our disagreement. It’s not that I don’t think genetics plays a significant role (although concerning exactly how much I probably disagree with you), it’s that if I adopted your strategy, I see no reason to stop at merely discriminating against blacks. Why not eugenics altogether? Your concern about genetics logically leads to this. You advocate measures which are effectively indirect, long-term forms of eugenics. But if you have no qualms about hurting a few people’s feelings, why stop there? Why not support the sterilization of people below certain IQ levels?

A focus on feelings is a reliable hallmark of those with no moral core at their center. The idea that opposing forced desegregation is necessarily indicative of hatred, much less a secret desire for genocide, is not only irrational, but exposes the ravenous, immoral beast at the heart of modern left-liberalism.

Observe the twisted left-liberal logic. First, there is the determination to deny reality. The genetic differences between the various human population groups either exist or not. The intellectual and behavioral limits imposed by those genetic differences either exist or not. And while for the last 50 years it has been de rigueur to claim that there are no genetic differences between various population groups, or that any differences are meaningless, advances in human genetics mean that is now the genetic equivalent of belonging to the Flat Earth Society.

Second, there is the illogical claim that recognizing those genetically imposed limits between various groups must necessarily lead to eugenics. This can only be true if one is operating from an immoral assumption of the right of some central authority to impose minimum capability requirements on the population. Needless to say, I completely reject this notion. The fact that some people are observably incapable of living in an advanced civilization does not justify harming them or treating them as sub-human. There is no reason they should not be able to live in the sort of society in which their predecessors have successfully lived for thousands of years.

Why stop with mere feelbad? Because human beings do not have the right to not experience hurt feelings. It is not possible to construct a legal system, much less maintain a society, on the basis of the avoidance of hurt feelings. However, humans of every genetic melange and intellectual capacity have the right to life, the right to self-defense, and the right to procreate. Segregation may advantage some and disadvantage others, it may cause many to feel hurt and rejected, but it does not intrinsically cause material harm to anyone; billions of people of every creed and color would not have historically self-segregated if it did. Sterilization and eugenics, on the other hand, obviously do inflict a considerable amount of direct and material harm on the individual.

Moreover, segregation is a natural and organic process. To fight it is to literally fight nature. Consider that despite its overall population being swollen by an alien invasion and relentless propaganda cheering the manifold blessings of diversity, London has seen its white-British population fall by 620,000 in only ten years, much faster than any of the experts expected. After fifty years of “civil rights” America is still unofficially segregated by neighborhood, by city, by suburb, and even by state.

Leo Tolstoy wrote about the great tides of human events that are totally beyond any human capacity to control. He used the example of Napoleon at Waterloo and showed conclusively how Napoleon didn’t know what was happening during the battle or even what units were involved in its most critical phases. In like manner, the precise way in which the inevitable reaction to the imposition of mass immigration and cultural invasion is impossible to predict, but no one with any sense of history can reasonably deny it is going to take place.

My opinion is that it would be much better for the governments of the West to align their actions with that inevitable reaction than to oppose it, but I have little hope that will be the case. Many will argue that because the reaction has not taken place yet, it will never happen, but one could have accurately said that prior to every large-scale event in human history.

Cry raciss all you like. It will change nothing. Deny the existence and the significance of human genetics until you turn blue. It will change nothing. Profess your undying allegiance to the religion of human equality with all the fervor of an early Christian martyr. It will change nothing. For as the white liberal aid worker raped in Haiti came to discover, there is no magical incantation that will save you from being out-group when the in-group turns against the outsiders.

The Flat Gene Society is even more ridiculous than the Flat Earth Society. At least those who belonged to the latter had the excuse of correctly observing what they saw with their own eyes. The Flat Gene Society requires ignoring science and history as well as the evidence of one’s own eyes.

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.