Tag: science

At least, not fast enough to confer legitimacy on scientific fraud:

Dr. Hauser, whose field is the comparison of human and animal minds, is the author of “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.”

A Harvard press officer, Jeff Neal, at first refused to confirm that Dr. Hauser was on leave or that Harvard had conducted any investigation. But a message on Dr. Hauser’s laboratory phone says he will be on leave until the fall of 2011, and at least two scientific journals are acknowledging problems in Dr. Hauser’s articles that were brought to light by an internal Harvard inquiry.

The journal Cognition published an article by Dr. Hauser and others in 2002 saying that tamarin monkeys could learn certain rules much as human infants do. The journal is about to run a retraction saying that an internal examination by Harvard “found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are retracting this article. MH accepts responsibility for the error.” The initials M.H. refer to Dr. Hauser.

Rah for the Orange… rah for the Orange… rah for the Orange and Blue! Now, I wouldn’t wish to judge my fellow Bucknellian overharshly, but if turns out that there has been any scientific malfeasance underlying Dr. Hauser’s inaccurate conclusions, it would be a strong indication that one should not take scientific theories about morality and moral development with a straight face. You have to seriously wonder about what is wrong someone who would actively deceive others in attempting to revise the traditional understanding of morality.

One can’t help but notice that the science fetishists who are constantly worrying about the “threat” that teaching Creationism or Intelligent Design poses to school children never seem to make a peep about what one British biologist describes as an actual threat to science in the schools:

In an interview with Horticulture Week, the man in charge of the herbariums at the Natural History Museum, said Britain faced a shortage of naturalists in the future just when the country will need experts to deal with the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss. He blamed the problem on a “lack of teachers who know about the natural world”.

“Even if the Government decided to put natural history on the primary curriculum, how would it do so with teachers who don’t have the basic skills? They are often terrified of the natural world – they scream at the sight of insects and tell the children ‘don’t touch’. The whole point is to engage them, but when people are frightened of handling soil, then we have a problem.”

This presents an interesting dividing line between the Darwinian cultists who are driven by their atheistic ideology, which takes a very pro-feminist position, and the science-driven evolutionists who are non-partisan on ideological matters. If teachers who are afraid of dirt and insects are having such a markedly negative effect on the teaching of natural science, then why haven’t we heard anything from the biology blowhards on the subject?

There has been a similar silence on Title IX science, which tends to indicate that political correctness is much more important to them than science.

It is science:

Put more sex in your life: It slows aging. A Scottish study found that thrice-weekly action stripped at least four years off participants’ faces, and getting busy even boosts immunity and reduces heart disease

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that who you are having sex with also matters. I don’t think thrice-weekly gay sex with a Haitian drug addict is going to slow aging, except perhaps in the sense that one actually isn’t getting any older.

So much for “the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences” and “the scientific breakthrough of the century, perhaps of all time”.

“We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome”

SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?

Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely. . . . [W]e have, in truth, learned nothing from the genome other than probabilities.

SPIEGEL: Did it at least provide us with some new knowledge?

Venter: It certainly has. Eleven years ago, we didn’t even know how many genes humans have. Many estimated that number at 100,000, and some went as high as 300,000. We made a lot of enemies when we claimed that there appeared to be considerably fewer — probably closer to the neighborhood of 40,000! And then we found out that there are only half as many. I was just in Stockholm for the 200th anniversary of the Karolinska Institute. The first presentation was about the many achievements the decoding of the genome has brought. Then I spoke and said that this century will be remembered for how little, and not how much, happened in this field.

One needn’t insist that the Human Genome Project was entirely useless – it wasn’t – to learn the very important lesson that asking scientists how government money should be spent is a terrible idea. Let’s face it, “a cure for cancer” is the scientific translation of that old politician’s standby: “for the children”. Science would appear to be our best bet for curing cancer prior to the Eschaton, but that doesn’t mean handing over blank checks to every flim-flam artist with a PhD and a white coat is a sensible investment that justifies the opportunity cost.

And, of course, like the Neo-Keynesians, the Darwinians will never admit that this expensive and cataclysmic failure of so many scientific predictions and expectations casts a degree of doubt upon the reliability of their pseudo-scientific model. The historical and scientific fact is that the world of genetics isn’t anywhere nearly as simple as their evolutionary model had led them to believe it was.

The New York Times belatedly discovers that sciencebloggers don’t actually give a damn about science qua science.

Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?

Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

There is the salient bit: “rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science”.” That is exactly the same point about the fraudulent bait-and-switch so often utilized by scientists upon which I have been hammering for several years now. It is interesting that an increasingly broad spectrum of people are now beginning to notice that just as not all that glitters is gold, not all that identifies itself with science is actually scientific. Writing about science isn’t science. Bitching about the Catholic church isn’t science. Molesting food with malicious intent isn’t science. Even teaching about science isn’t science. These things may be important, they may be necessary, they may be entertaining, but they are not science. This is precisely why I have always identified PZ Myers and others like him as charlatans; they claim to be scientists on the basis of their academic credentials rather than because they are actually doing any science.

By which logic I note that I am not only an economist, but East Asian to boot. If studying Japan doesn’t make you Japanese, studying science cannot make you a scientist.

Dan Gezelter of Open Science contemplates the question:

Popper concluded that it is impossible to know that a theory is true based on observations (O); science can tell us only that the theory is false (or that it has yet to be refuted). He concluded that meaningful scientific statements are falsifiable.

A more realistic picture of scientific theories isn’t this simple. We often base our theories on a set of auxiliary assumptions which we take as postulates for our theories. For example, a theory for liquid dynamics might depend on the whole of classical mechanics being taken as a postulate, or a theory of viral genetics might depend on the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. In these cases, classical mechanics (or the Hardy-Wienberg equilibrium) are the auxiliary assumptions for our specific theories.

These auxiliary assumptions can help show that science is often not a deductively valid exercise…. Falsifying a theory requires that auxiliary assumption (AA) be demonstrably true. Auxiliary assumptions are often highly theoretical — remember, auxiliary assumptions might be statements like the entirety of classical mechanics is correct or the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium is valid! It is important to note, that if we can’t verify AA, we will not be able to falsify T by using the valid argument above. Contrary to Popper, there really is no asymmetry between falsification and verification. If we cannot verify theoretical statements, then we cannot falsify them either.

Since verifying a theoretical statement is nearly impossible, and falsification often requires verification of assumptions, where does that leave scientific theories? What is required of a statement to make it scientific?

In light of the increasing tendency of scientists to gravitate towards credentialism, authoritarianism, and hiding behind fictional concepts of property, I find the development of the Open Science movement to be both significant and encouraging. There is nothing that will hinder, if not outright prevent, the transformation of science from a method open to anyone into a technocratic ideologically-driven priesthood more effectively than forcing scientific papers and pronouncements to stand publicly on their own merits.

Open Source Software has transformed the world of software development; at least one-third of the programs I now use on a daily basis are OSS. I suspect Open Science has the potential to have an even more significant and even more necessary impact on the increasingly corrupt and politicized field of science. But just as the developers of proprietary software continue to fight the rising tide of open source software, one can expect the practitioners of closed science to bitterly resist open science. I, for one, anticipate hearing the convoluted arguments they will present for keeping science safely locked away behind credentialed doors.

Many things have changed in the past 46 years, but Richard Feynman’s definition of science is even more applicable today than it was when he first articulated it: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

PTQ claimed that science has a vast track record of correct predictions while religion has none. “Science has produced zillions of correct predictions. Religion has produced none. A bigger winner-loser gulf does not exist.” Very well, then let’s place a bet on the matter:

Religion: The poor will be with you always.
Science: Global poverty will be ended by 2025.

From The End of Poverty by economist Jeffrey Sachs: “This book declares, at the core, that steadfast, science-based approaches can end extreme poverty on the planet. The benefits of modern science and technology which have reached Bulgaria and most of the rest of the world can work for the poorest of the poor as well…. the great challenge and possibility of our time: to end extreme poverty on the planet by the year 2025.”

Now, since this is far from the first time that the possibility of an end to poverty has been proclaimed; religion’s track record over the previous two millennia remains unblemished to date. But here we have a straightforward science-based claim that extreme poverty can be eliminated from the planet in 15 years. Science says it can be done. Religion, specifically the Christian faith, says it can’t.

If, as has been claimed, scientific predictions are so much more reliable than religious ones, obviously the pro-science side will have to give the pro-religion one the odds. I don’t think it’s necessary to go as far as demanding zillion to one odds; I’ll settle for 1200 to 1 and put up one U.S. dollar against one ounce of gold that the religious prediction is correct, the scientific prediction is incorrect and extreme poverty will not be eradicated from the globe by 2025.

Now, put your money where your mouth is, science fetishists. If you won’t, recognize that you are admitting you don’t actually believe that religion does not produce correct predictions despite those predictions having been made thousands of years before the scientific ones. The fact is that some religion is so much more accurate than science in certain matters related to human behavior that it can spot science the additional experience of 2,000 years of human history upon which to draw and still best it.

Richard Dawkins and other atheist science fetishists are much bothered by the fact that scientific evidence is considered less reliable, and therefore less uniformly admissable in court, than eyewitness evidence and documentary evidence. This is not because they are deeply concerned about the various legal systems of the Western democracies, (although I daresay I can testify better than most what an absurd miscarriage of justice they represent), but rather because the elevation of testimonial and documentary evidence above scientific evidence strikes a mortal blow to their primary argument against the existence of God, gods, and the supernatural.

While the more ignorant atheists stupidly attempt to argue that there is no evidence for God, atheists who are sufficiently familiar with the dictionary to avoid being so easily dismissed tend to set their sights on elevating scientific evidence over other forms of evidence in the interest of laying a foundation for their science-based arguments. However, demonstrating their near-universal incapacity for logic, these atheists turn instinctively to science in a misguided attempt to prove the superiority of scientific evidence to all other forms of evidence and thereby manage to guarantee their own failure by missing the point about the nature of evidence, the way it is acquired, and most importantly, its ultimate purpose.

For there are at least three reasons scientific evidence is not only considered less reliable by the courts than eyewitness testimony, but it is CORRECTLY considered less reliable than eyewitness testimony.

1. The dynamic nature of science. For some reason, scientists believe the public has a short memory and think it’s perfectly fine to sweep all their past mistakes and erroneous assertions under the table and pretend that their conclusions are typically static and reliable. And from the scientific point of view, it probably is, since it is in the interest of the scientific community to reach consensus and keep everyone more or less on the same page. The present scientific system is set up to encourage consensus and discourage any challenging of the present status quo; as we have seen in the ever-shifting sands of the AGW/CC discourse, the facts change much more often than the consensus diagnosis and concomitant policy prescription. However, in a court setting, there is no consensus and the interests of the two sides are diametrically opposed. It is not possible to sweep any of the many past mistakes and erroneous assertions under the table and the existence of any past alterations of the relevant theory will used to weaken, if not entirely discredit, the validity of the present science. So, science is not credible in an inherently oppositional setting due to its dynamic nature. Given that nature, science is usually in the position of an eyewitness who is forced to admit that he testified not-X prior to testifying X. And given the history of science, it is a very simple matter for any skilled lawyer to demonstrate that there is much more than a shadow of a doubt, there is in fact a reasonable mathematical probability, that science will once again testify not-X in the near future.

2. Science is not scientific evidence. Whereas the science that underlies the evidence presented may be relatively reliable, this does not make the evidence itself reliable. Even if we assume that scientists are pure and holy – and we have no shortage of evidence demonstrating otherwise – the production of scientific evidence relevant to a court case requires a number of actions by scientists and non-scientists that permit considerable room for error. In a country where the police routinely plant drugs during arrests and are often proven to be liars whenever there is a film record available to contradict their written reports, it would be deeply illogical to imagine that scientific evidence is not tainted by the unreliability of the human element involved no matter how reliable the underlying science is believed to be. The testimony of an impartial witness with a faulty memory is logically far more trustworthy than scientifically impeccable evidence presented by a collection of government employees who possess strong financial and personal incentives to produce a guilty criminal party.

3. Science is not, as actual scientists keep trying to remind the science fetishists, in the business of providing proof. Therefore, attempting to utilize science as a means of proving something beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt is a misuse of science and amounts to little more than attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole.

“Yawning is a sign of sexual attraction, scientists claim.”

Right, guys. And when a woman doesn’t laugh at a scientist’s bon mot, it’s a sign she thinks he’s really charming. Given that the average scientist couldn’t score at a convention of nymphomaniacs with daddy issues, I should think they would be among the least credible people on the subject.