Tag: science

In which a scientific experiment indicates that replacing fallible eyewitness testimony with “scientific evidence” such as DNA would be a really bad idea:

Interpreting alleles in a joined or partial sample is where the subjective opinion of an algebraist could play a part. To test this, New Scientist teamed up by Itiel Dror, a neuroscientist at University College London and head of Cognitive Consultants International, and Greg Hampikian of Boise State University in Idaho.

We took a mixed sample of DNA evidence from an actual crime scene- a coterie rape committed in Georgia, US- which helped to convict a fortify called Kerry Robinson, who is currently in prison. We presented it, and Robinson’s DNA contour, to 17 experienced analysts working in the same accredited government lab in the US, out of any contextual information that might bias their judgement.

In the spring case, two analysts from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Robinson “could not have existence excluded” from the crime scene sample, based on his DNA profile. (A second man convicted of the same crime also testified that Robinson was an assailant, in return for a lesser jail term.) Each of our 17 analysts independently examined the profiles from the DNA ad~, the victim’s profile and those of two other suspects and was asked to connoisseur whether the suspects’ profiles could be “excluded”, “cannot be excluded” or whether the results were “indecisive”.

If DNA analysis were totally objective, then all 17 analysts should get to the same conclusion. However, we found that just one agreed through the original judgement that Robinson “cannot be excluded”. Four analysts related the evidence was inconclusive and 12 said he could be excluded.

What science fetishists consistently fail to understand is that scientists are the weakest link in the reliability of science. The scientific method is reliable only insofar as the humans who perform the observations and test the results are reliable. And there is no shortage of evidence, scientific and otherwise, to show that scientists are as intrinsically unreliable as every other collection of human beings.

It would appear that none of the homosexual activists ever thought through the logical ramifications of the so-called “gay gene”:

A hormonal treatment to prevent ambiguous genitalia can now be offered to women who may be carrying such infants. It’s not without health risks, but to its critics those are of small consequence compared with this notable side effect: The treatment might reduce the likelihood that a female with the condition will be homosexual. Further, it seems to increase the chances that she will have what are considered more feminine behavioral traits. That such a treatment would ever be considered, even to prevent genital abnormalities, has outraged gay and lesbian groups, troubled some doctors and fueled bioethicists’ debate about the nature of human sexuality.

First, the fact that any gay groups would be “outraged” over a medical treatment that is intended to prevent serious physical abnormalities shows that their priorities are too solipsistic to be taken seriously. Logic has always dictated that if there was a material cause for orientational challenges, there would always be at least the potential for medical science to successfully address that cause and correct for the defective orientation.

The fact that some unfortunates are born without limbs and manage to live reasonably happy lives despite their birth defect does not make limblessness either normal or desirable, just as the idea that someone has been born orientationally-challenged does not mean that anyone else has to be born that way in the future. I am not entirely convinced that all orientational challenges are birth defects; like most things homosexuality is likely a combination of nature and nurture. But even if we set all moral and religious tradition aside, (the wisdom of which is of course debatable), there can still be no question that to the extent nature is responsible, homosexuality is a birth defect from every relevant secular, material, and sociological perspective. Defective is not synonymous with bad. Blind people aren’t bad and yet scientists seek to give them sight. Deaf people aren’t bad and yet scientists seek to help them hear. So, there is no need to condemn gays in any way in order for scientists to help them achieve sexual normality.

If you are determined to find something to worry about, don’t fret about the possibility that parents will one day be able to select anti-gay therapy for their unborn children. In light of the AGW/CC shenigans, I would be more concerned about the nascent totalitarians in the Gaian movement forcibly mandating pro-gay therapy in the interests of population control. There’s really no rational reason for this to become a political issue anyhow, not in a country where unborn children can be murdered at will by their mothers. It would be impossible to convincingly argue that a parent has the legal right to kill a child but not therapeutically de-homo one.

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.”