Tag: science

Mailvox: Obama vs science education

Scott Hatfield of Monkey Trials writes about the standards of science education:

I invite you to read the state science standards for high school biology in California. You’ll find those on pages 51-56 of this PDF file. It’s true that evolution is in there, but there is absolutely no requirement to teach ‘scientific history.’ I admit that I give one lecture on Mendel and his experiments when I teach genetics, and one lecture on Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle and how that (and the thought of others, like Malthus) influenced his thought.

Other than that, the other 178-days of instruction are pretty much the concepts and facts that you can see on the standards, which are in fact voluminous. I can’t speak for PZ and Dawkins, but I assure you that I care very much about the fact that there is less time for experiments and far too much time spent prepping for the standardized tests which, under NCLB, are used by the states and the fed to rate schools.

By the way, if your looking for a way to improve science ed, then please join me in rejecting the OBAMA administration proposal to tie teacher evaluations more closely to testing. A rare offer for you and I to unite in a criticism of the present administration!

Again, check out what we actually have to teach. There’s a lot to cram in 180 days, and to do it, we typically are sacrificing labs, especially the highly-instructive but time-consuming ones that take weeks to complete.

I have no problem whatsoever condemning the Obama administration proposal. Teacher evaluations and education standards are not Constitutional concerns of the U.S. federal government and Obama has no business attempting to dictate such things. Now, I’m certainly not against the use of standards in evaluating teachers; one reason for the drive towards objective standards is that the political power of the teachers unions is completely out of hand in some states. Given that testing can be an over-blunt club, I’m curious to know how Scott would prefer to see teachers evaluated. And while I don’t understand how opposing a proposal for a change can improve the current situation, I am happy to oppose it nonetheless.

Obviously, a science teacher whose black, inner-city, public school students score an average 80th percentile is probably a much better teacher than one whose Chinese, suburban, private school students average 85th percentile. And it’s also clear that straightforward teaching to the test will tend to restrict a teacher’s ability to focus on whatever aspects of his subject he thinks is important. But I’m sure Scott also realizes that for every good science teacher who wants to push his students and expose them to actually learning how to utilize the scientific method, there are several who would spend the entire school day haranguing their students on anything from Marxism and patriarchal oppression to Genesis and Scientology if given the opportunity.

I don’t have an answer myself. But I’m curious to know what Scott’s recommendation would be. As for “science history”, that’s often what is taught in lieu of science. Whether one considers the cult of Adam Smith or the cult of Charles Darwin, even a moment of reflection should suffice to determine that the Great Men of Science theme is actually a historical theme, not a scientific one. An astronomer has absolutely no need to know if it was Pythagoras or Copernicus who thought the Sun orbited the Earth in order to calculate the orbit of an extrasolar planet just as a biologist has absolutely no need to know if it was Darwin or Paley who articulated evolution by natural selection when he is figuring out the utility of junk DNA.

Don’t get me wrong, I think scientific history is tremendously interesting and knowledge of economic history is actually quite valuable in understanding how and why the present orthodoxy went so badly awry. The more unsettled a science is, the more important the historical knowledge will be. Reading Joseph Schumpeter’s mammoth History of Economic Thought played a major role in my critical revisitation of Ricardian free trade, then Friedmanite monetarism. But repeating anecdotes about finches and shoemakers should never be confused with actually calculating debt/GDP ratios or collecting butterflies.

For the record, I no more object to teaching evolution than I do to teaching Keynesian macroeconomics or any other extant idea. In other words, I insist on them being taught and being taught accurately. It is only when you have fully and correctly understood a concept that you can truly grasp the intrinsic and/or potential flaws in it. For example, I found this requirement to be more than a little amusing: “8. Evolution is the result of genetic changes that occur in constantly changing environments. As a basis for understanding this concept: a. Students know how natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms.” I should, of course, be very interested to know how they know that, given that even Richard Dawkins has now admitted that the science is still unsettled on whether Darwin was fundamentally wrong about the very core of his so-called “dangerous idea”. The logic is at least superficially sound, but is the science? After all, that is precisely what still remains to be determined.

But to be clear, it must be understood that while I am an outright Keynesian Denier, a Marxian Denier, and a Friedmanite Denier, I am but a mere Darwinian Skeptic.

No mention of the real problem

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.

When science is no longer 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.

Mailvox: the implications of evolution

John C. Wright responds to the recent CNN report on religion, political tendencies, intelligence, and evolution that cited a 6-point average IQ advantage for liberal atheists:

I love how these ‘Just So’ stories always just so happen to flatter the person telling it. Just for the sake of contrast, I’d like to see an evolutionary sociobiologist
say something along the lines of: “Being an atheist, like being a sociopath, is a defective mutation of the genes human beings use to recognize meaning in life. Robbed of this basic faculty of human thought, atheists tend to retreat into paranoid fantasies of superiority, as if their inability to grasp reality were a result of greater, rather than lesser, intellectual activity.

“Consequently they tend to be bookish, and selfish, and to cut social ties to family and friends: but this crippling isolation and arrogance, ironically, allows some of them to score well on I.Q. tests, which do not, after all, measure those social skills that tribes of hunter-gatherers need to survive.

“The fact that no civilization and no tribe in the history of the world has been atheist, except for a very few malignant Twentieth Century regimes of unparalleled savagery and bloodshed, might indicate why atheism has had no positive influence on the philosophy, art, culture, law or advancement of civilization since the dawn of time. Natural selection culls this unfavorable mutation, and only in the
luxurious modern day, when science can keep alive even worthless and backward members of the bloodline, has it been possible to preserve a statistically significant moiety of this evolutionary dead end.

“Sufferers of what is now called ‘The Dawkins Syndrome’ are generally acknowledged to be harmless irritants in their host sociieties, but, as the cases of Russia and China make abundantly clear, when this dangerous ‘meme’ of self-centered defensive arrogance spreads to others, the result is genocidal levels of mass murder.”

There are several amusing aspects to this. First, I find it very funny indeed to see people whose IQs are more than thirty points lower than mine attempting to cite a six-point average IQ advantage as proof of their superior intelligence, and therefore, their belief systems as well. I’m impressed, to be sure, albeit not exactly in the way they intended. An appeal to authority is bad enough, but an appeal to average statistical advantage is insane.

Second, this appears to be confirmation of something I described in TIA. Atheists are going to be more intelligent than the average by literal self-definition. The ability to understand and identify with an abstract concept that departs from the norm requires some basic level of intelligence, which excludes many less intelligent and non-religious individuals who are by every meaningful definition atheists but do not self-identify as atheists. Libertarians, for example, would benefit from the same self-selecting mechanism. It is possible that the Kanagawa study corrected for this identification bias, but that is unlikely as I am unaware of any study of atheism and religion that has done so.

To me, the most interesting and counterintuitive discovery is the reported link between sexual exclusivity and male atheism. That surprised me, although I suppose it shouldn’t have if I had thought about it more. Now, one can’t read too much into this yet, since we don’t know what exactly what “sexual exclusivity” means, but it does tend to contradict what one would expect given the male atheist obsession with religious sexual restrictions. The hint is the divergence between male and female atheists, so my suspicion – and at this point it is nothing more than that – is that the Kanagawa report will provide some evidence of the link between atheism and social autism. The dichotomy between the theoretical sexual freedom of the male atheist provided by his belief system and his actual sexual limitations caused by his sub-standard attractiveness to women suggests that male atheists, on average, are more inclined to be gamma/omega males whose sexual options are more restricted than the norm. This hypothesis is supported by observing the consistently gamma behavior of male atheists on this site and around the Internet in general.

In fairness, science bloggers are rather stupid

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.

The hunt intensifies

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.

Science self-corrects

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.”

A card falls out of the stacked deck

The whitewashers slip up:

A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign last night, just hours after the inquiry began. Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed that he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

That’s just science at work, right? Because nothing says “science” like the editor-in-chief of Nature being caught out in a lie about his lack of predetermined views on the subject. I am not saying that all scientists are dishonest, corrupt, ideological propagandists, I am merely pointing out the obvious fact that because some of the most institutionally-respected scientists have proven themselves to dishonest, corrupt, ideological propagandists, the logical observer has no choice but to distrust anything a scientist says that is not independently replicable. The fact that one can have reasonable confidence in the scientific method absolutely does NOT mean that it is reasonable to have confidence in the scientist who claims to have utilized it.

And, for the sake of the obtuse scientific illiterati, I will once more point out the important and obvious fact that peer review is not, and has never been, any more intrinsically scientific than white lab coats or being unattractive to women.

Scientific consensus = false

The fraud and deception of the “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming/climate change continues to pile higher:

The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

I’ve been a total skeptic from the beginning and even I think this is beginning to get ridiculous. They haven’t gotten ANYTHING right! By the time this round of exposes is done, I half expect to be told that Al Gore and the climate change “scientists” are humanoid aliens from Europa who require a frozen climate to live comfortably.

Criminal scientists

So much for the Climategate denialists claim that the global warming email scandal didn’t reveal any wrongdoing or anything outside the scientific norm:

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The Climategate denialists are not only defending frauds and liars, but criminals. This is now a fact. I have known this from the start, because man-made global warming is simply not taking place and therefore anyone who claims it is is either deluded, mistaken, or lying. In the case of the so-called scientists, it’s quite clear that they fall into the latter category.

The fact of the matter is that scientists are no less likely to be full of BS than anyone else, and scientists whose access to outsized incomes depends upon reaching specific predetermined conclusions are no more trustworthy than investment bankers touting a company in which they hold significant equity. For example, Phil Jones, the lead charlatan at the heart of Climategate, is reported to have collected 55 endowments amounting to $22.5 million for his pseudo-scientific crimes. The more insidious problem is the possibility that the Climategate denialists are telling the truth and that these sorts of shenanigans probably is the scientific norm.