Tag: science

The immoral mind of Marc Hauser

It’s a serious blow to the “morality evolved” crowd when one of its chief proponents, Harvard’s Marc Hauser, has been found to have engaged in scientific misconduct in attempting to find evidence to support his theories of moral evolution:

Marc Hauser, a prolific scientist and popular psychology professor who last summer resigned from Harvard University, had fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways, according to the findings of a federal research oversight agency posted online Wednesday.

The report provides the greatest insight yet into the problems that triggered a three-year internal university investigation that concluded in 2010 that Hauser, a star professor and public intellectual, had committed eight instances of scientific misconduct. The document, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday, found six cases in which Hauser engaged in research misconduct in work supported by the National Institutes of Health. One paper was retracted and two were corrected, and other problems were found in unpublished work.

Although Hauser “neither admits nor denies committing research misconduct,” he does, the report states, accept that federal authorities “found evidence of research misconduct.”

According to the federal findings:

-Hauser fabricated data in a 2002 Cognition paper that was later retracted, which examined monkeys’ ability to learn patterns of syllables. He never exposed monkeys to a particular sound pattern described in the experiment, despite reporting the results in a graph.

-In two experiments, researchers measured monkeys’ responses to patterns of consonants and vowels, a process called “coding” their behavior. Hauser falsified the coding, causing the results to pass a statistical test used to ensure that a particular finding was not just a chance result. Colleagues coding the same experiments came up with different results. Hauser “acknowledged to his collaborators that he miscoded some of the trials and that the study failed to provide support for the initial hypothesis,” the report said.

-A paper examining monkeys’ abilities to learn grammatical patterns included false descriptions of how the monkeys’ behavior was coded, “leading to a false proportion or number of animals showing a favorable response,” the findings stated. In an early version of the paper, he falsely reported that all 16 monkeys responded more strongly to an ungrammatical pattern than a grammatical one. Records reviewed by investigators found that one monkey responded in the opposite way and another responded equally. Hauser claimed that the behavior was coded by three scientists, when in fact he was the only one who measured their behavior. Then, when the manuscript was revised, he provided a false numerical description of the extent of agreement among multiple observers in coding behavior, despite being the only observer. All issues were corrected before publication.

I’ve read Hauser’s Moral Minds twice, and while it is head-and-shoulders above the likes of Dawkins and Harris, I did not find his arguments particularly compelling, for the most part, not that I wasn’t above citing them in my incomplete debate with Dominic.

More data please

The initial results of the religion and paternal age survey have been intriguing, so much so that it may justify a more methodical investigation into the hypothesis. However, we need a bit more information in order to tease out the strength of an effect called the demographic confound.

So, if you don’t mind answering the following questions, please do so, but keep the following instructions in mind: Answer only for yourself. Not your siblings, your children, or your parents. Also, Anonymous responses will not be counted.

Name. (Not real name, just make something up so we can keep things straight.)
Birth year.
Age of father at birth
Age of mother at birth
Sex (M/F)
Parents married through age 18 (Y/N)
Strength of belief on the Spectrum of Theistic Probability. (1-7). The milestones are as follows:

1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G. Jung: “I do not believe, I know.”
2. De facto theist. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. “I don’t know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.”
3. Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. “I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.”
4. Completely impartial. Exactly 50 per cent. “God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.” Agnostic.
5. Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. “I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.”
6. De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. “I don’t know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”
7. Strong atheist. “I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one.”

Science thanks you for your assistance.

Atheists and Daddy issues

Behold science in action. We’ll begin with the well-known observation that many atheists have serious problems with their fathers. To this, we add the fact that scientists at Boston University, the University of British Columbia, and UC Davis have all reported evidence supporting my original hypothesis that there is a connection between atheism and higher than normal Asperger’s Quotients, as well as this new study, which has the potential to explain the reason for that connection.

Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age, scientists reported on Wednesday, in the first study to quantify the effect as it builds each year. The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found….

The overall risk to a man in his 40s or older is in the range of 2 percent, at most, and there are other contributing biological factors that are entirely unknown.

My random thought of the day is that older fathers not only increase the number of random mutations, but also tend to behave differently than younger fathers. Certainly everyone who has multiple children knows that the youngest is brought up somewhat differently than the eldest, and at least part of this may have to do with the increased age of the father rather than “been there done that” syndrome. This means that the children of older fathers are likely to experience a double-whammy of Nature and Nurture teaming up against them with regards to the probability of their turning out neurotypical.

This all leads to my hypothesis that the reason atheists are less likely to be neurotypical and less likely to believe in the existence of gods and the supernatural is because their fathers are, on average, older. This hypothetical causal connection between the age of the father and the atheism of the child is interesting in that it would have the potential to explain both the relatively recent increase in the number of atheists as well as the reason Europe is more atheist than the United States and other religious countries.

The testable prediction generated by this hypothesis is that there will be a statistically significant difference in the average/median age of fathers of atheists and the rest of the population. The average age of the atheist’s fathers should be older than the norm, while due to their much greater numbers, the average age of religious individual’s fathers will very closely approximate it. Unfortunately, the USA doesn’t track the age of fathers, only first-time fathers, but Australia does.

1. The average age of a first-time dad in the U.S. was 29.65 in 2010, considerably younger than a Western European equivalent of 32.51 (based on the average of UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain only).

2. Between 1988 and 2008 the median age of married fathers increased by almost three years, from 31.0 to 34.1 years, while the median age of unmarried fathers who acknowledged the birth of their child also increased, from 27.0 years to 29.8 years. In 2008 the median age of all fathers was 33.1 years. [This indicates that the median age of all fathers in Australia was 30 in 1988.]

So, for the time being, we’ll use 30 as our approximate average age. And like we did before, let’s take an informal poll here to see if the average age of fathers of the atheists here is, in fact, above 30. Just indicate if you are atheist, agnostic, or religious, and your father’s age when you were born. Here are some examples:

Vox Day: religious-25
Richard Dawkins: atheist-26
Christopher Hitchens: atheist-40
Daniel Dennett: atheist-32
Bertrand Russell: atheist-30
John Russell: atheist-50
Skatje Myers: atheist-32
Friedrich Nietzsche: atheist-31
H.G. Wells: atheist-38
Scott Atran: atheist-26

So the average age of the father of the New Atheists is 32.7. So far so good. Anyone know how old Sam Harris’s or PZ Myers’s fathers were when they were born?

TIA: the meme spreads

Courtesy of Scott Atran, the argument that religion does not cause war has now reached both Science and The Chronicle of Higher Education:

it’s not the criticism of ecclesiastical overreach that bothers Wilson and Atran; it’s the conflation of science and advocacy. Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature “Why I Am an Atheist” on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that “attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea.” It’s proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.

That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that “only a small minority of recorded wars” have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. “Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science,” says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. “Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful.”

The Science article is entitled “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict” and appears in Science 336, 855 (2012). The relevant passage cites The Encylopedia of Wars and states: “In fact, explicit religious issues have motivated only a small minority of recorded wars. There is little religious cause for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts and world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international conflict.”

Given the absurd assertions by science fetishists who insist that I do not understand science, I find it more than a little ironic that a number of real scientists are not only making use of my ideas, but my methods as well, in publishing professional peer-reviewed science.

Spanking is child abuse

But apparently chemical lobotomies are nothing more than good parenting:

The researchers found that doctor visits between 1993-1998 and 2005-2009 that involved a prescription of antipsychotic medication for children jumped sevenfold — from 0.24 to 1.83 per 100 people. For teens, 14 to 20 years old, the rate rose from 0.78 to 3.76 per 100 people, and for adults, it just about doubled, from 3.25 to 6.18 per 100 people….

Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist from Ithaca, N.Y., and an outspoken critic of widespread antipsychotic use in children, said these drugs damage developing brains

“We have a national catastrophe,” said Breggin. “This is a situation where we have ruined the brains of millions of children.” In controlling behavior, antipsychotics act on the frontal lobes of the brain — the same area of the brain targeted by a lobotomy, Breggin said. “These are lobotomizing drugs,” he added. “Of course, they will reduce all behavior, including irritability,” he said….

Between 2005 and 2009, controlling “disruptive behavior” accounted for 63 percent of the reason antipsychotics were given to children and almost 34 percent for adolescents, the researchers found.

To say nothing of what they do to long-term cognitive capacity. Between widespread chemical lobotomies and ubiquitous vaccines, I’m amazed that anyone still believes that medical “science” is genuinely focused on attempting to help children grow up to live healthy and productive lives.

It would be informative to know how these children on antipsychotics do on IQ tests before and after their brains are bathed in chemicals for years.

South African science

Lightning is raciss!

Following a spate of deaths from lightning in the province of Natal, Nomsa Dube of the Provincial Executive Council promptly called on the National Department of Science and Technology to investigate what causes lightning:

We will do an investigation and talk to the department of science and technology on what is the cause of the lightning, and if it only happened to the previously disadvantaged, as I have never seen any white people being struck by lightning.

At least Americans and Europeans will have the benefit of a nice object lesson in what happens when a civilized nation hands over the keys of government to the previously disadvantaged in South Africa. Certainly no one appears to have learned anything from the fate of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

“A spurious doubling”

In which we learn that the global warming scammers are as statistically inept as the biologists:

Using Leroy 2010 methods, the Watts et al 2012 paper, which studies several aspects of USHCN siting issues and data adjustments, concludes that:

These factors, combined with station siting issues, have led to a spurious doubling of U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.

Other findings include, but are not limited to:

· Statistically significant differences between compliant and non-compliant stations exist, as well as urban and rural stations.

· Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.

· Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.

· Urban sites warm more rapidly than semi-urban sites, which in turn warm more rapidly than rural sites.

· The raw data Tmean trend for well sited stations is 0.15°C per decade lower than adjusted Tmean trend for poorly sited stations.

· Airport USHCN stations show a significant differences in trends than other USHCN stations, and due to equipment issues and other problems, may not be representative stations for monitoring climate.

This is the sort of scientific debacle that became inevitable once the definition of “science” is broadened to include editorial and statistical analysis. It is particularly problematic because most of the scientists who are messing around with the statistics and simulations that serve as the entire basis of their “science” have no more statistical training, and considerably less simulation design experience than I do.

I have tremendous respect for the utility of the scientific method as a knowledge tool. The problem is that much, if not most, of what presently passes for science has literally nothing to do with the scientific method. Which, of course, lends itself to the corruption, fraud, and incompetence that is so reliably demonstrated by the climate “scientists”.

Universal suffrage vs democracy

This post by Roissy should help explain why the Founding Fathers limited the vote to about one-fifth of the male population:

If you are apt to align your lifestyle with whatever is the latest fashion, (and ostracize those who don’t), you are probably also apt to blindly obey high status authority figures telling you what is good for you. If true, then we might speculate that women make better cultural foot soldiers for whichever elite authority is most tangible in their lives, owing to women’s greater propensity to accept authority dictums without question.

We may add to this speculation not only personal observation and confirmatory heaps of anecdotes, but in addition scientific evidence that women are, indeed, more obedient to authority than are men. Courtesy of reader uh pointing us to this Milgram experiment replication:

Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram’s subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a “cute, fluffy puppy” who was given real, albeit harmless, electric shocks. They found similar findings to Milgram: half of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed to the end. Many subjects showed high levels of distress during the experiment and some openly wept. In addition, Sheridan and King found that the duration for which the shock button was pressed decreased as the shocks got higher, meaning that for higher shock levels, subjects showed more hesitance towards delivering the shocks.

Always remember: All female participants in the Milgram obedience to authority experiment continued shocking the puppy despite their tears.

Contemplate this: if all women are willing to shock cute little puppies simply because an authority figure told them to do so, what won’t they be willing to do? No doubt the women who participated in the experiment had no desire to harm puppies and would explain their behavior by saying “he made me do it”, but that malleability is the entire point.

Resistance to evil requires the ability to stand up to it and refuse to submit. Jesus was not merely obedient to His Father, he also refused to bow down before the Prince of the World. And note that it’s not only women who lack the ability to resist perceived authority, but half of all men as well. It’s not merely women’s suffrage, but universal suffrage that caused democracies to become dictatorial.

It also underlines the importance of watching women’s actions, not listening to their words. If asked “would you ever subject a puppy to a painful electric shock of no possible benefit to it?”, most of those women would quite vehemently deny the very idea. However, the evidence indicates that if instructed to do so, they would, in fact, do it, even though the action caused them significant personal stress.

Anyhow, I’d be interested to know how many people here, male or female, believe they would shock the puppy at the behest of the men in white coats. I don’t think I would object to giving it a mild shock or three in the interest of science, but if this experiment truly mimicked the Milgram one and I was told that the voltage was high enough to seriously harm or even kill the puppy, there is a non-zero chance I’d punch out the scientist before hooking him up to his device and giving him a shock or two. At the very least, I believe I would deliver a solid “WTF is wrong with you people” rant before kidnapping the puppy.

But then, it is well known that I regard scientists with nearly as much suspicion as male elementary teachers who just love children. So I suppose it wouldn’t be much of a test of authority in my case.

So much for “the science is settled”

Now it is the turn of evolutionary scientists discover that Richard Dawkins is a deeply unpleasant individual:

A disagreement between the twin giants of genetic theory, Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, is now being fought out by rival academic camps in an effort to understand how species evolve.

The learned spat was prompted by the publication of a searingly critical review of Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in Prospect magazine this month. The review, written by Dawkins, author of the popular and influential books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, has prompted more letters and on-line comment than any other article in the recent history of the magazine and attacks Wilson’s theory “as implausible and as unsupported by evidence”.

“I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory,” Dawkins writes.

The Oxford evolutionary biologist, 71, has also infuriated many readers by listing other established academics who, he says, are on his side when it comes to accurately representing the mechanism by which species evolve. Wilson, in a short piece penned promptly in response to Dawkins’s negative review, was also clearly annoyed by this attempt to outflank him.

“In any case,” Wilson writes, “making such lists is futile. If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston [a mythical fire-like element] and navigating with geocentric maps.”

As I noted a few years ago in The Irrational Atheist, Richard Dawkins is not a scientist, he is an ex-scientist. Dawkins has always been inept when it comes to arguing against intelligent and informed interlocutors, so it should come as no surprise that he would blunder badly when trying to take on EO Wilson, even in the event that he happens to be right.

Dawkins’s statement also raises a serious question. If a famous and heavily credentialed biologist like EO Wilson truly does not understand evolutionary theory, what could possibly be the use of attempting to teach it in public schools?

Scientists are still stupid

It is truly remarkable how few supposedly intelligent science majors intending to pursue doctoral degrees and careers in science understand the concept of supply and demand or the significance of price information:

Michelle Amaral wanted to be a brain scientist to help cure diseases. She planned a traditional academic science career: PhD, university professorship and, eventually, her own lab.

But three years after earning a doctorate in neuroscience, she gave up trying to find a permanent job in her field. Dropping her dream, she took an administrative position at her university, experiencing firsthand an economic reality that, at first look, is counterintuitive: There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

That reality runs counter to messages sent by President Obama and the National Science Foundation and other influential groups, who in recent years have called for U.S. universities to churn out more scientists. Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.

The ironic thing is that many scientists and science students simultaneously complain about science pay being too low while calling for more science education. So, not only are they ignoring the information being provided by the price – the low pay signifies that there are too many scientists – but they are actually seeking to make the problem worse by increasing the already glutted supply!

Forget permitting these clueless wonders to run society as per the scientific technocracy of their utopian dreams, I find it astounding that we even let them vote. As for the politicians, we already know they don’t grasp the link between price and supply or they wouldn’t be so intent on immigration amnesty, among other things.