Tag: science

Sex in the City vs Science

I found the juxtaposition of these two Telegraph articles to be more than a little amusing. First is one Becky Pugh expressing an all-too-typical female opinion on the wisdom of settling for a husband rather than holding out for the Sex in the City dream of a tame Alpha who is chastened by the near-loss of the precious snowflake he almost permitted to get away:

Time and again, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw could have walked off into the sunset with kind, wholesome Aidan. But she didn’t. Instead, she valiantly endured years of pain while she listened to her instincts and waited for Mr Big. She was right: just look at them now (as far as we know they are living happily ever after, which is where we left them at the end of the first movie). Like Jane Eyre and Carrie Bradshaw, most women would rather wait for Mr Right, and risk ending up alone, than settle for dependable, passionless Mr Second Best…. it’s easy to see how the temptation to skip down the aisle with Mr He’ll Have To Do Because He Is The Only Impregnator Available To Me is a strong one. But, even so, Gottlieb’s watershed age of 30 is fantastically mean.

I note, with a straight face marred only by the occasional twitch to indicate the degree of silent inner mirth I feel, that Jane Eyre and Carrie Bradshaw are both fictional characters and it just may possibly be sub-optimal for a woman to base her relationship philosophy upon them. Can you even imagine what women would say if a man wrote a column recommending men to base some of their most significant life decisions on the lifestyle choices of Aquaman and the Green Lantern? And if she thinks Ms Gottlieb’s watershed age of 30 is “fantastically mean”, one wonders how she’ll describe the latest scientific research on age and fertility.

While they may continue to produce eggs throughout their 30s and 40s, the reservoir of potential eggs from which they are taken has shrunk to almost nothing, it suggests. As the body chooses the best eggs from the reserve, the likelihood is that the quality of the eggs will suffer as you get older increasing the difficulty of conception and the risk of an unhealthy baby….

It shows that on average women are born with 300,000 potential egg cells but this pool declines at a much faster rate than first thought. By the age of 30 there is only 12 per cent left on average and by the age of 40 just three per cent. Dr Hamish Wallace, the co-author, said: “Our research shows that they are generally over-estimating their fertility prospects.”

If there is one thing that a single woman between the ages of 18-25 badly needs to understand, it is this: there are plenty of girls on the girl tree. They make new ones every day. And it probably wouldn’t hurt that single woman to keep in mind that while there will always be men who will be interested in her, the social status and perceived quality of those men will begin to decline drastically somewhere between the age of 25 and 30. Ask a gamma male; they all know that a woman at 30 is much more in play for them than she was five years before. In fact, that’s precisely the sort of thing they rely upon in order to land a halfway-attractive woman.

Abortion may cause breast cancer after all

This is an interesting, if unsurprising, backpedal by the medical community:

In April 2009, seven researchers from organizations highly respected in scientific academia published a study, “Risk factors for triple-negative breast cancer in women under the age of 45 years,” in the prestigious journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The focus of the report was the revelatory finding that “a distinct etiology” exists between oral contraceptive use and triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly virulent form of the disease that typically strikes women under 45, many African-American.

TNBC was only first described in scientific literature in 2007. So for this study the seven researchers re-examined 897 saved cancerous breast tissue specimens from two previous studies to see if they tested positive for TNBC.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The seven researchers concluded the risk for TNBC rose an appalling 250 to 420 percent, depending on the length of oral contraceptive use.

This was news enough, but buried in the study was acknowledgement and additional corroboration of the link between abortion and breast cancer…. The seven researchers concluded women with histories of abortion increased their risk of getting TNBC by 40 percent.

As is so often the case, never trust a “scientific consensus” that is claimed by scientists with an obvious axe to grind. I was always skeptical of the irrational vehemence with which feminist doctors and scientists insisted that abortion couldn’t possibly ever cause any sort of cancer and that it would be criminally irresponsible to even suggest that such a link might even be theoretically possible. But the truth usually comes out sooner or later.

There is no global warming: glacier edition

To put it bluntly, if you still believe that “scientific consensus” means anything, or that that man-made global warming is actually occurring, you’re an idiot:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research….

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

So, telephone interviews are now science? That’s cool. I have been doing a crazy amount of science since RGD came out.

Mailvox: defining science

BR emails to inform us that the definitions of the various elements of science in TIA have proven useful:

Vox, the definitions of science that you developed in TIA have been very useful. I recently described climategate to some friends like this: Fraudulent Scientistry was finally tripped up by established Scientage. Scientody takes a bow, and Science itself is none the worse for it. The discussion that followed was priceless.

Of course, I can’t take any credit for the development of the tripartite science definition. That was the Fowl Atheist’s work. I merely provided the nomenclature and publicized the concept, a Dawkins to his Darwin, if you will.

Dinosaur science

The OC suggests a new theory that explains the disappearance of the dinosaurs. “I wonder how all those dinosaurs managed to get to Titan in order to die and leave those vast oceans of volatile liquid hydrocarbons?” But the answer is so obvious. Rockets. It’s dinosaur science and the global consensus of astrosaurinauticists is totally settled.

The bracing -180°C temperatures prevalent on Titan mean that water ice acts more the way rock does here on Earth, and the liquids filling the seas and lakes are hydrocarbons which would be gaseous here – methane, ethane and such – though of course we humans like to liquefy and store them under pressure to run our barbecues, patio heaters etc. Just as water does here, however, the patio-gas seas evaporate when conditions are favourable to form clouds and fog, which subsequently rain down as LPG elsewhere. Earth and Titan are thus the only bodies in the solar system with surface geology moulded by movements of liquid.

And clearly, Earth and Titan are the only bodies in the solar system to have been colonized by spacefaring dinosaurs; the Sea of Krakens must have been their sacred burial ground. But this discovery of dinosaur space travel is even more significant than the OC imagines, since it could have incredible ramifications for biology as well… my hypothesis is that Man was not only bred, but uplifted by these spacefaring dinosaurs as well, hence the sudden increase in cranial size that paleontologists find so puzzling. Because artificial selection is known to be so much faster than natural selection, the Dinosaur Science hypothesis offers the perfect solution for Young Earth Creationists, Evolutionists, UFOlogists and Pan-Spermians alike. As for the Chicxulub and Barringer sites, it is now apparent that those were the dinosaur equivalents of Cape Canaveral and Volograd.

And now we have finally have the answer to the nature of God. Saurian.

Now I’m just wondering if the Nobel Committee is going to have to hold off another year on awarding me the Physics prize for the discovery of Dark Vapor, since obviously establishing such a ground-breaking scientific theory of this multidisciplinary significance will have to take precedence.

Godless and clueless

This science-related news is precisely why I find the constant atheist whining about nonexistent religious threats to science to be not only spurious, but downright nonsensical:

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students. The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

The average atheist who considers himself to be a strong supporter of science is far more worried about warning stickers on evolution textbooks than he is about the elimination of all science labs and the science teachers who teach them at a major high school. I’ll be surprised if this news gets one-tenth the attention on Scienceblogs that the average evolution-related kerfluffle at a school board does. You may recall that the usual suspects weren’t the least bit concerned about the coming application of Title IX quotas to science either.

It’s apparent that it’s not so much science that the godless self-proclaimed devotees of “science” and “reason” support, but rather scienthology. And being ideologically unsophisticated, they can’t even imagine a threat to science coming from the Left because they wrongly believe science to be inherently progressive. This also demonstrates that their devotion to reason is as tenuous as their supposed dedication to science.

Fractured physics and the death of Darwin

I’ve been paying closer attention to the LHC experiment than I normally would because I’m very curious to see how stubbornly scientists will cling to theories should they be proven outmoded by the very experiments designed to support them:

ormer Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts contemplating a “plan B”, failure could lead to “chaos and infighting”.

He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory and undermine some of the mainstays of sceintific thinking, the Standard Model, a general theory of how particles fit together to create matter.

I’ve also found it to be interesting how in physics – real science – there is very little, if any, of the defensive and irrational babbling often heard from true-believing TENS advocates about how a lack of an alternative theory somehow justifies the continued use of a theory already known to be intrinsically flawed. It is usually easier to show that a suggested answer is incorrect than it is to come up with a plausible alternative answer, and it should not be forgotten that through eliminating false pathways, negative results also represent scientific advancement.

As I have consistently suggested, TENS is not only a predictively useless model, but a scientifically flimsy one as well. In fact, it is looking increasingly likely that it will be abandoned by the scientific consensus during our lifetimes. Once I began studying the subject, it was immediately obvious to me that critics had been focusing on the less vulnerable parts of the theory from the start; it is the natural selection element that has even less reliable scientific evidence to support it than speciation or the concept of evolution itself.

Consider the results of some of the first methodical scientific research into the natural selection hypothesis:

The new research, carried out by Mark Pagel and colleagues at the University of Reading, in England, studied 101 groups of plant and animal species and analyzed the lengths of branches in the evolutionary trees of thousands of species within these groups. The lengths of the branches are a measure of the time elapsed between two species branching off.

The researchers then compared four models of speciation to determine which best accounted for the rate of speciation actually found. The Red Queen hypothesis, of species arising as a result of an accumulation of small changes, fitted only eight percent of the evolutionary trees. A model in which species arise from single rare events fitted eighty percent of the trees.

Dr Pagel said that the research shows speciation is the result of rare events in the environment, such as genetic mutations, a shift in climate, or a mountain range rising up. Over the long term new species are formed at a constant rate, rather than the variable rate Pagel’s team expected, but the constant rates are different for different groups of species.

The work suggests that natural selection may not be the cause of speciation, which Pagel said “really goes against the grain” for scientists who have a Darwinian view of evolution. The model that provided the best fit for the data is surprisingly incompatible with the idea that speciation is a result of many small small events,

Now, this research deals with the matter of natural selection’s time scale rather than its existence, but nevertheless underlines my point that the natural selection hypothesis has always been logic, not science. The fact that it is difficult and dangerous to paint grizzly bears pink in order to see if they breed less successfully doesn’t change the fact that no one has ever tested the widespread assumption of why polar bears are white. And while the jury is still out on both matters, the exposed cracks in the major theories naturally leads to a philosophical question: since the foundations of both modern physics and modern Darwinism appear to be wobbling, what is the basis for considering materialism to be rational given such demonstrably flawed understandings of what the material happens to be?

Mailvox: science is a thing of the past

A mathematician/physicist writes of the negative effect peer review has on science:

I am writing concerning some pieces of yours I’ve seen which appear to be examining the peer review process in science. There can be little doubt that the peer review system presently in place is flawed, to the extent that it is doing science a grave disservice. I have now retired after being a senior lecturer at an English university in mathematics until 2002, before transferring to physics where I remained until retirement in 2008. In that time I have seen the reviewing standards in many of the so-called prestigious physics journals, as well as more general journals such as Nature, slump. I have also noted a difference in attitude from editors. Now they usually refuse to discuss any submission; if a paper is rejected, that is normally the end of the matter.

I catalogued cases in a number of areas of physics in a book “Exploding a Myth: ‘Conventional Wisdom’ or Scientific Truth?” There is little doubt, although I cannot prove it, that those controlling science and scientific funding in the UK would not have wanted this book publicised since, if the general public became aware of what is really going on, they might be less inclined to fund these hugely expensive dubious projects like the Large Hadron Collider and LISA. Incidentally you might be interested in some of the cases I discussed, particularly the one where I and a colleague took Nature to the Press Complaints Authority – and won. It’s worth noting that “Against the Tide” by Martin Corredoira and Carlos Perelman is similarly not as well known as it should be. It too reveals much of what’s going on in science. It should be realised that everything simply supports the status quo; anything that might rock the boat is buried. Hence, truly original science is becoming a thing of the past.

It sounds like a pair of interesting books, well worth checking out. What far too many scienthologists fail to understand is that it is not the critics of science who pose a real and present danger to science, but rather the very scientists whose abuse and misuse of it are being criticized. If the public begins to tire of funding science, which is a probability in the more negative economic scenarios, scientists will have no one to blame but the charlatans and ideologues in their midst.

Climategate: a prediction

This time, it’s bound to be right. But when did the scientific method become: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Copenhagen climate conference: Met Office predict 2010 will be warmest on record. A new forecast for 2010 predicted it will be almost 1F (0.6C) higher than the long term average of 57F (14C) across the globe as a result of natural weather patterns and global warming…. However skeptics point out that the Met Office said 2007 would be the warmest on record, but it was not in the top five.

A “new forecast”? One that unexpectedly predicts record heat, no less? How very timely! I have little doubt that there was a “scientific” debate at Met Office that went something like this:

Scientist #1: “We need to do something to distract the press from that $%*#($% Jones and his leaked emails.”

Scientist #2: “Well, the PR boffins said they have almost two thousand signatures on the integrity statement.”

Scientist #3: (sarcastically) “Yeah, $*%”&*($# brilliant! ‘You think we’re fabricating the data already, so we’re going to throw more data you won’t believe at you.'”

Scientist #1: “Nine out of ten scientists believe that scientists have integrity… hmmmm, that wasn’t the best idea.”

Scientist #2: “Well, they did the falling polar bears… yeah, we really need a new PR agency.”

Scientist #1: “So, what do we do?”

Scientist #3: “We tell them that next year is going to be the Ecopolypse. Hell on Earth. The hottest on record. If they’re not scared any more, then we need to crank it up to eleven. New York under water. Polar bears stalking the streets of London. Artic beach vacations.”

Scientist #2: “But models say that it’s going to be relatively cool!”

Scientist #3: “So what? When have our models ever been right? Our climate models suck so completely that Tiger hit on them at the last British Open. It’s a no-lose proposition. Sure, we’ll probably get it wrong and then we’ll have to hope the media will cover our asses. But they’ve been solid on the CRU leak, and if we get it right, we’re @*%#(%^* gold!”

Scientist #1: “Actually, if I run Mike’s Nature trick on the latest GISS numbers, it could be 0.2F hotter next year.”

Scientist #3: “&*%* that 0.2F! We need one whole $*%$&(#$*%&$*% degree. It’s got to be simple enough that every idiot dumb enough to take this $*%! literally will do a linear extrapolation and panic when they realize that in a century, it will be 100 degrees hotter!”

Scientist #2: “You really think we can get away with it?”

Scientist #3: “Why not? We did in 2007.”

Digging deeper

Malcolm Gladwell simply isn’t smart enough to know when it’s time to throw in the towel:

First, the editorial in question made a number of other arguments that, I think, most observers would agree fall on one end of the nature-nurture continuum: that all IQ tests measure the same thing, that heredity is more important that environment in determining it, that group differences are relatively unaffected by schooling or socioeconomic factors. It also said that the IQs of different races cluster at different points, with the average IQ of blacks falling about a standard deviation lower than that of whites, and that these differences show no sign of converging over time.

Actually, first should have been Gladwell admitting that his statement about there being “no connection” between NFL draft order and quarterback performance is completely, utterly and provably false. But let’s summarize the points Gladwell makes in his continuing attempt to steer the discussion away from his egregious blunder by attacking “Stephen” Pinker. (The man’s name is actually Steven Pinker – you’d think Gladwell could get it straight by his second letter addressing Pinker’s criticism.)

1. Something Gladwell thinks about what most people would agree about an article. Who cares what Gladwell thinks about what people would agree with or not? And what does this old editorial have to do with Gladwell’s hypothesis about NFL quarterbacks anyhow? Irrelevant.

2. Only one-third of the editorial board signed the statement. BFD, especially since Gladwell doesn’t know the others “declined” to sign it, he only knows they didn’t sign it. Conclusion unsupported by facts.

3. The editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal! Well, then it must be false, right? Genetic fallacy. And still irrelevant.

4. 14 of 52 signatories had received funding from an organization that Gladwell doesn’t like. Genetic fallacy #2. And, yes, still irrelevant.

5. I don’t know enough about a 1996 APA report on intelligence to judge if Gladwell’s summary of it is correct or not. But regardless, what does what Gladwell describes as its oppposition to “IQ fundamentalism” have to do with NFL quarterbacks and draft position anyway? All Gladwell has managed to prove proves is how far he is willing to stray from the original subject in attempting to poison the well against Pinker’s correct criticism of his egregious blunder regarding NFL quarterbacks.

However, Steve Sailer insists that there is method to Gladwell’s seeming madness:

[Y]ou’ve got to admit that Gladwell has a point: if people can make more accurate than random predictions about which college quarterbacks will be better than other college quarterbacks, then they can make predictions about more politically incorrect things, too. Thus, Gladwell wages relentless war upon predictions, upon quantitative thinking, upon science, indeed, upon that ultimate evil: knowledge.

It is no surprise that Gladwell is predisposed to attack both knowledge and the scientific fact of inherited intelligence, given how it is eminently clear that the man doesn’t possess a great deal of either.