Tag: science

JB muses on the limits of science:

It’s funny how the same bad epidemiological science (weak and inconsistent macro correlations instead of hard causations) that underpins the disaster of modern dietetics is also responsible for the entirety of the case against smoking. Confusion also arises on both issues when experiments conflate the effects of processed, unfresh, adulterated ingredients with fresh, unadulterated ones, and forget to factor the rise of industrial processing into their timelines.

These massive scientific errors have caused untold premature deaths. The entirety of western civilizational diseases, including cavities, heart disease, cancer and diabetes, could be eliminated in an instant by returning to a paleolithic high or all meat diet. This is indisputable: the onset of all these diseases has been observed in paleolithic societies switching to western food.

But then, the fifth highest cause of death in America is medical error. And global warming scientists recently attempted to construct a framework for world government on a knowingly fraudulent premise. So we should all be wary of science.

What else has science disastrously gotten wrong? Ah yes, psychology, politics, history, sociology, the family, gender relations, economics… better to ask what science gets right: Physics. Math. Engineering. Repeatable, testable, non-human endeavors.

Human-heavy fields are still too filled with biases and complications and dynamism for one to trust the scientific consensus to be correct, much less the popular consensus. It is necessary to read widely and with a mind not only open but eager to absorb ideas intelligently presented but patently insane. Otherwise one will never escape the idiosyncratic mental strictures of one’s time and place.

With the singularity approaching before the next century, human brains will soon be regarded as little more than go karts in a world of F-15s. Now why would one blindly trust a consensus of go karts?

I have always found it amusing that science fetishists seldom realize how hopelessly wrong their understanding of material reality is. For example, they genuinely believe that technology is the fruit of science, when both history and logic conclusively demonstrate that science is the result of technological advancement. They have the basic relationship between the two precisely backward.

Given their inability to understand such a simple and obvious fact, to say nothing of all of the many manifest failure of the scientific method in areas where its application is either complicated or simply inappropriate, their confidence in it as the only method of human understanding or “progress” is not only remarkable, but risible. Hence the quasi-religious aspect of scienceology, which should never be confused with the actual scientific method.

Darwin Dynasty Cursed By Inbreeding:

Charles Darwin’s family suffered from the deleterious effects of inbreeding, suggests a new study that serves as ironic punctuation to the evolutionary theorist’s life work. Pioneer of the theory that genetic traits affect survival of both individual organisms and species, Darwin wondered in his own lifetime if his marriage to first cousin Emma Wedgwood was having “the evil effects of close interbreeding” that he had observed in plants and animals.

Three of their children died before age 10, two from infectious diseases. The survivors were often ill, and out of the six long-term marriages that resulted, only half produced any children. According to researchers at Ohio State University and Spain’s Universidad de Santiago de Compestela, that alone is a “suspicious” sign that the Darwins suffered from reproductive problems.

Setting aside the fact that Darwin was by no means a pioneer of genetics, as that would be Mendel some years later, it is more than a little ironic that the evolutionist’s loss of his Christian faith after the tragic loss of his children may have been at least partially the result of his family’s habitual inbreeding. How often we blame God for the inevitable consequences of our own actions.

Without the ability to hide the data, there won’t be much room for sustaining the manufactured “scientific” consensus:

Scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast have been ordered to hand over 40 years of research data on tree rings after a three-year battle with climate sceptics. The ruling by the Information Commissioner sets a precedent for scientists having to comply with the strictest interpretation of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. It suggests that in future academics will not be able to avoid handing over data by claiming that the task would be too onerous or that it would breach intellectual property rights.

No doubt we will soon be hearing great lamentations about how open data and independent verification is anti-science.

Which is, of course, those crafty creationists:

Traditional science experiments ‘disappearing’ from schools
Almost all science teachers and lab technicians said they were now being prevented from staging certain practicals in biology, chemistry and physics lessons, it was claimed.

The study – by Science Learning Centres, a network of teacher training colleges – said more than two-thirds of staff admitted axing experiments because of a lack of space in the curriculum. Four-in-10 blamed the demands of exams and assessment. According to the study, some 28 per cent of teachers had been forced to drop classroom practical because of bad behaviour among pupils, while one-in-10 cited health and safety fears.

The amusing thing is that the self-styled defenders of science who are so vocal about so many unrelated issues don’t give a damn about the state of scientific education. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are FAR more concerned with preventing creationism from being taught as an alternative to time + chance + natural selection (probably) + magic stardust/aliens than they are with the fact that students are increasingly being taught scientific history rather than science.

Or, at least, finds itself directly contradicted by the basic scientific method:

The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error….

It’s pretty obvious that these factors create a host of potential problems, but Young provided the best measure of where the field stands. In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial. So, how do we fix this?

The consensus seems to be that we simply can’t rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they’re loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is “We’re both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.”)

To me, the central problem appears to be that few scientists understand statistics and probability well enough to be permitted to make use of them in a manner which merits any credibility. The widening gap between econometric models and the performance of the real economy, combined with situations like the recent revelation that many, if not most genetic studies purporting to show natural selection were based entirely upon false positives, highlights the importance of performing actual science according to the scientific method rather than substituting a derivative and passing it off as science.

Like logic and philosophy, statistical analysis is informative and useful, but it is not intrinsically science.

At least, the sort of science blogger I’ve encountered over the years, such as Myers, Brayton, and Orac, are. They have reliably proven to be narrowly educated, logic-challenged, emotionally incontinent individuals with reading comprehension problems and an astonishing ignorance of recorded history. They don’t seem to grasp that their paranoid “defense” of science against the hordes of creationists slavering to, well, put stickers on textbooks for fifth-graders who can barely manage to read or count to fiver doesn’t pass for science or its defense in the eyes of any rational observer. You’d think science bloggers would worry a lot more about the economy than stickers and school boards, but then, they’re economic illiterates too. But let the science journalists speak for themselves:

Today who is treated with the most skepticism by the general public? Science journalists and climate scientists. Even Big Pharmacy marketing departments who have found a golden egg in the vaccine industry have more trust among the public.

Ghosh went on to say something that I know resonated with everyone in the room. Journalists, he said, “do not defend science. Ask the awkward questions.”

So Ghosh does not blame bloggers for the demise of science journalism, he seeks to get them back on the right path and once again become the “trusted guides” they once were regarding complex climate issues. With him on the panel was Mariette DiChristina of “Scientific American”, who nodded at all the right places while he spoke, yet does not seem to realize that her magazine is a culprit along with the rest of them. “Scientific American” is not a trusted guide, it is more like a tour guide in Istanbul who takes you on a tour that will always end at his brother’s carpet store. And with that decrease in credibility has come a decrease in readership and jobs while a magazine like “The Scientist” still has high regard among scientists and casual science readers alike.

Kennedy had the most vitriol. He did not dislike all blogs, he said, he read blogs on environmental policy and politics – in other words, he was willing to settle for opinion and lack of expertise on matters outside the science field – he just couldn’t find a single one in science worth a darn. Only large newspapers and high end journals deserve to survive.

Of course, most of this is simply Old Professional Media bitching about the Uncontrollable Amateur Media. It’s still pretty funny, though, to see the editor-in-chief of Science ripping to shreds the very individuals who flatter themselves as being the brave guardians of science and secularism against the threat of a new religion-inspired Dark Ages.* “Not worth a darn” is a bit more generous than I would grant, but it’s certainly an apt description.

*I know. And you know. But they don’t, which tends to underline my point.

UPDATE – Ed Brayton underlines my point about science bloggers and their relative lack of intelligence in both his failure to understand the logical irrelevance of the question he wanted to ask Washington as well as his amusing inability to keep his story straight.

“As for your challenge to debate, I will consider it – if you can give a coherent answer to the following question”
– Ed Brayton, February 26

“Ellis Washington did not challenge me to a debate.”
– Ed Brayton, March 1

Yeah, I’m sure Ed is one FEARSOME debater. He’s probably doing the right thing by evading Washington, because even if Washington is a scientifically illiterate fool, that doesn’t mean that Brayton won’t shoot down his own argument without any help from Washington. And Ed, perhaps your own readers needed it spelled out for them, but everyone else understood that you didn’t believe anyone could answer your irrelevant question. That was kind of the point about how you’re using it avoid the risk of embarrassing yourself.

Which you’ve now managed to do anyhow. No wonder the real science journalists have almost as much contempt for your kind as I do.

First bounds on the Higggins boson

“The left shaded portion is the mass range excluded by LEP, and the central shaded region is the range excluded by the Tevatron. High masses are excluded by precision measurements of the weak mixing angle and the W mass, leaving only the range 115–150 GeV/c2 for future searches if the standard model is the correct theory.”

I find the Great Boson Hunt to be rather interesting, mostly because I am anticipating the prospect of all the amusement that will be provided by the competing explanations for why the standard model of particle physics is incorrect, what the most likely alternatives are, and whose fault it was.  It is quite funny to think of all the time and effort that has gone into the search for something that may still turn out to be no more real than the mythological pegasi. And yet, one has to respect the physicists, as unlike the evolutionary biologists, they have the intellectual integrity to test their assumptions and are even willing to abandon their theoretical models when their predictions fail rather than angrily defending them in the face of the observable evidence.

As we all know, if Haldane’s famous rabbits in the pre-Cambrian are ever found, it will take about two nanoseconds for the Darwinists to begin shrieking that what they had previously sworn up and down was a pre-Cambrian strata were actually Palaeogene rocks and this doesn’t disprove anything anyhow and maybe it’s not a real rabbit and why do you hate science you stupid Creationist bible-thumper…. Actually, come to think of it, it’s almost a pity that physicists don’t behave this way.

No worries, it’s just evolution in action:

Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon, university officials said. The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.

Since we’ve been informed so many times that scientists are trained to be rational and objective, and that science is what scientists do, it is clear that Prof. Bishop’s actions should be considered an experiment in natural selection rather than a crime. For as we know from the regrettable slanders stemming from Hackergate, no scientist would ever do something terrible like invent data, much less shoot anyone, in the tawdry, unscientific pursuit of filthy lucre.

UPDATE: It’s hard to be a butterfly collector. There’s a lot of stress, especially when they are so cruel as to make you do a little math. “As members of the biotechnology program, students have to pass core classes in biology, chemistry and chemical engineering. But Ms. Bishop became convinced, he said, that the chemical engineering professors were trying to keep biology students from succeeding by making the classes too difficult.”