Tag: science

The Supreme Court renders vaccine makers unaccountable:

The Supreme Court today gave vaccine manufacturers greater protection from lawsuits by parents who say vaccinations harmed their children, ruling that Congress had blocked those types of claims against drug makers. In a 6-2 decision, the justices said Congress had effectively shut the courthouse door to these lawsuits in 1986, when it created a special vaccine court designed to compensate victims of vaccine injuries.

Contrary to the common assumption, I am not uniformly anti-vaccine. I think some vaccines make sense and represent a reasonable risk. On the other hand, I simply do not understand those people, especially left-wing scientists, who insist that all vaccines are intrinsically good. The following questions spring to mind:

1. Why does profiting from vaccines rather than anything else magically make a corporation intrinsically good rather than presumably greedy and evil?

2. How can one justify vaccines for non-lethal and non-communicable diseases on the basis of historically lethal and highly communicable diseases?

3. If vaccines are not capable of causing serious harm to children, why is it necessary to set up a system to compensate children who have been harmed and immunize vaccine makers from financial responsibility for those their products have injured?

4. How can anyone rationally claim that science uniformly supports vaccine use when no empirical studies that actually utilize the scientific method of experimentation and observation are utilized in testing vaccine safety?

5. Why do pro-vaccine advocates attack those who don’t vaccinate their children according to the vaccine schedule when doctors specifically tell parents not to vaccinate their children according to the schedule if an older sibling has had a negative reaction to a vaccine?

6. Why do pro-vaccine advocates assume that vaccines which are proven to be safe for adults are also safe for infants and toddlers who weigh a fraction of what an adult weighs?

Now, based on the principle of “follow the money”, I am confident that the current vaccine schedule is significantly more dangerous than most anti-vaccine people believe. If they were anywhere nearly as safe as advertised, it wouldn’t be necessary to provide special protection to the manufacturers. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense to get vaccinized for tetanus and polio, but why on Earth would it make sense to take any risk, however slight, in order to avoid getting a cold or the chicken pox?

In case you ever wondered why I harbor such complete scorn for psychiatry and consider it to be intrinsically less scientific than astrology or even evolutionary biology, here is a pair of illuminating examples provided by Dr. Hervey Cleckley:

“I have become increasingly convinced that some of the popular methods presumed to discover what is in the unconscious cannot be counted upon as reliable methods of obtaining evidence. They often involve the use of symbolism and analogy in such a way that the interpreter can find virtually anything that he is looking for. Freud, for instance, from a simple dream reported by a man in his middle twenties as having occurred at 4 years of age drew remarkable conclusions. The 4-year-old boy dreamed of seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud interpreted the dream in such a way as to convince himself that the patient at 18 months of age had been shocked by seeing his parents have intercourse three times in succession and that this played a major part in the extreme fear of being castrated by his father which Freud ascribed to him at 4 years of age. No objective evidence was ever offered to support this conclusion. Nor was actual fear of castration ever made to emerge into the light of consciousness despite years of analysis

Faithfully following Freud’s method of establishing proof by analogy, a prominent psychiatrist in his well-known book Beyond Laughter has given us a remarkable interpretation of the drum majorette. Most of us are likely to think that the average man’s pleasant reaction to these well-built, sparsely clad young ladies who prance happily and often somewhat sexily before the band at football stadiums can be pretty well accounted for by tastes and impulses quite obvious in nearly anyone’s consciousness. Such tastes and impulses, according to the interpretation in Beyond Laughter, must be considered as superficial or perhaps even as the result of reaction formation. The lissome girl, we are solemnly told, stands out before the grouped band just as an erect penis stands out before the larger mass of the body. This analogy is taken as evidence that interest and excitement about the provocative lass do not lie primarily in the fact that any ordinary man would find her attractive. In our unconscious she is said to be equated with the erect male organ, and it is maintained that men really feel toward her, as she stands projected before the group, as they unconsciously feel toward the penis of another male. Our positive reactions toward her, we are told, arise from our unrecognized and unaccepted homosexuality. No corroborative evidence is offered, nor any doubt expressed, about this interpretation. It is soberly offered as a fact, presumably discovered by science.”
– The Mask of Sanity pp 407-408

Keep in mind that this pseudo-scientific analogical “proof” is not only the sole basis for much atheist speculation about theistic mental health, but is also the conceptual foundation underlying Keynesian General Theory as well as Paul Samuelson’s statistical perversion of it. It is also remniscent of the quality of empirical evidence that has been gathered in support of the natural selection mechanic.

The problem with the so-called ethics of science and medicine is that they don’t actually exist. They’re nothing more than an artificial and arbitrarily imposed set of guidelines created by an impotent non-authority. Even to the extent that they are supposed to exist, as in the case of the Hippocratic Oath, they are seldom honored except in the breach:

AUSTRALIAN medical students are carrying out intrusive procedures on unconscious and anaesthetised patients without gaining the patient’s consent. The unauthorised examinations include genital, rectal and breast exams, and raise serious questions about the ethics of up-and-coming doctors, Madison reports….

Of students who were put in this position during the research, 82 per cent obeyed orders. “We think that it is weakness in the ethical climate of the clinical workplace that ultimately serves to legitimise and reinforce unethical practices in the context of students learning intimate examinations,” writes Prof Rees.

The study consists of 200 students across three unnamed medical schools in Britain and Australia. Not all participants agreed to carry out the intimate examinations without permission from the patient.

One student refused to take part in an examination of a woman who was “part spread-eagled on the bed and the nurse is (sic) pulling down her jeans at the same time and it was all very complicated and you could see her, she was about seventeen”.

The problem isn’t that scientists are intrinsically unethical, because a scientist can subscribe to an objective moral code as readily as anyone else. The problem is that because so many scientists reject morality and religion, they are consequentially unethical by choice. Needless to say, this does not bode well for Sam Harris’s attempt to construct a morality on the basis of a morally neutral process.

The reason so many people were appalled by PZ Myers boasting of the scientific ability to drain the blood from dogs, behead small mammals, and view images of vivisected humans without remorse is that the obvious logical conclusion is that history teaches that most scientists are just as willing to gas Jews, freeze priests, and exsanguinate gays in the name of science and progress.

Only a 67% error rate. Why is that so completely unsurprising? I continue to find it remarkable that biologists insist on inserting their uneducated noses into other fields of study when they quite clearly have no idea what they’re doing in their own scientific discipline:

The world’s plant life is far less diverse than previously thought, with a review of about one million named plants finding that only one third of them are unique. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in southwestern London, has published “The Plant List” online Wednesday, updating a project conceived 130 years ago by the British naturalist Charles Darwin.

The list attempts to identify every plant known to science, and was begun in the 1880s with the help of a bequest from Darwin. The review found 300,000 unique species, and 480,000 synonyms for those species, meaning that many had been “discovered” and named several times by botanists. Another 260,000 names were listed as “unresolved,” meaning that botanists have so far been unable to determine whether they are a separate species of a duplication of one of the 300,000.

In the immortal words of Bill Belichick: “Do your job.” And yes, in answer to a question from one previous commenter, the fact that biologists can’t even be relied upon to correctly define a “species” or reliably identify them does very much call into serious question their various theories regarding the origin of those species. Or, you know, whatever they are.

“Well, we can’t tell you what it is, or even what “it” means, when we are examining what is right in front of us. But we can tell you with complete and utter confidence exactly how, and from what, these things that we can’t define or identify were developed thousands of years ago. And if you don’t believe us, then you just don’t understand science.”

Mmm-kay. I have come to the conclusion that many, if not most, biologists not only don’t grasp basic logic, they are not terribly clear on the concept of history either. Most people understand that if they said X yesterday and Y today, others will tend to find them less than perfectly credible and rather expect them to say Z tomorrow. The biologist, on the other hand, insists that X is really Y if you just squint hard enough and denies that there could ever possibly be Not-Y, not infrequently prior to Nature publishing an article declaring that Y, formerly believed to be X, has now been replaced by Z… or amusingly, in some cases, a new variant of X. And, as this botanical news yet again confirms, you don’t have to know what the variables are in order to recognize the dynamic pattern.

This was my favorite part: “Despite the surprising lack of diversity among plant life, the botanists and scientists associated with the project all hailed it as a milestone achievement for many different reasons.”

Congratulations, you finally figured out just how wildly inept your colleagues have been for the last 130 years. No doubt this very brief interregnum of inaccuracy will be rapidly and scientifically swept beneath the historical carpet. In fact, the error rate is worse than reported two-thirds; they were only able to specifically identify 29 percent since 25 percent are still “unresolved”. Now, no doubt this incident will tempt some intrepid devotee of Science Reason to resort to one of his favorite mantras: “science is self-correcting”. But as JQP has pointed out, this touching religious claim notwithstanding, science is not “self-correcting” in any way, shape, or form. Accountants also audit each other’s work and actually do so much more often than scientists attempt to replicate other scientists’ experiments… to the extent that scientists even do any experiments in the first place. And yet we don’t consider accounting to be “self-correcting” simply because the books may be audited at some point in the future. As for peer review, that is more commonly known as “editing” by the rest of the publishing world. There is a word that best describes any field in which news reports regularly involve the words “than previously thought”. That word is “unreliable”.

Even economists, whose imprecision borders on legendary at this point, usually manage to do better than this. Can you imagine if the quarterly GDP revisions reported $14.4 trillion for Q4 2010, subsequently revised to $4.2 trillion? (The scary thing is that’s not actually unthinkable if one considers the amount of credit supporting those numbers.) Or if Bloomberg reported that the Dow dropped from 11,755 to 3,391. The only reason biologists can get away with this astounding level of imprecision is that their butterfly collecting and theoretical fairy tales don’t have much material significance in the real world.

I have no doubt that many young schoolchildren with an interest in the life sciences dream of studying biology, traveling to exotic foreign lands, studying wonderful animals… and killing them:

Some scientists studying penguins may be inadvertently harming them with the metal bands they use to keep track of the tuxedo-clad seabirds, a new study says. The survival rate of King penguins with metal bands on their flippers was 44 percent lower than those without bands and banded birds produced far fewer chicks, according to new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The theory is that the metal bands — either aluminum or stainless steel — increase drag on the penguins when they swim, making them work harder, the study’s authors said.

Science: it’s all about the self-correction. And here you thought I was exaggerating when I said that biologists are rather stupid. They can’t even figure out that strapping metal onto swimming birds just might be a problem, and yet they expect us to swallow their latest Evolutionary Fairy TaleStable Strategy they just concocted to replace the one that previously proved absurd. I probably shouldn’t keep cracking jokes about empirically testing natural selection by painting polar bears pink… no doubt there is a biologist out there who would think it’s a great idea.

Not only has it been confirmed by their university curriculums that scientists learn next to nothing outside their chosen disciplines, but it now appears that biology students don’t even know much about their own scientific specialty or understand how some of its basic functions operate:

The researchers assessed the fundamental science knowledge of more than 500 students at 13 U.S. colleges in courses ranging from introductory biology to advanced ecology. Most students did not truly understand the processes that transform carbon. They failed to apply principles such as the conservation of matter, which holds that when something changes chemically or physically, the amount of matter at the end of the process needs to equal the amount at the beginning. (Matter doesn’t magically appear or disappear.)

Students trying to explain weight loss, for example, could not trace matter once it leaves the body; instead they used informal reasoning based on their personal experiences (such as the fat “melted away” or was “burned off”). In reality, the atoms in fat molecules leave the body (mostly through breathing) and enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water. Most students also incorrectly believe plants obtain their mass from the soil rather than primarily from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “When you see a tree growing,” Anderson said, “it’s a lot easier to believe that tree is somehow coming out of the soil rather than the scientific reality that it’s coming out of the air.”

The researchers say biology textbooks and high-school and college science instructors need to do a better job of teaching the fundamentals – particularly how matter transforms from gaseous to solid states and vice-versa. It won’t be easy, Anderson said, because students’ beliefs of the carbon cycle are deeply engrained (such as the misconception that plants get most of their nutrients from the soil).

Needless to say, these brilliant biologists-of-the-future are primarily concerned that little kids might not be indoctrinated with pseudo-scientific fairy tales about the origin of the species, despite the fact that they themselves quite clearly don’t even understand how the various species live and grow today. Keep this in mind the next time a biologist is attempting to lecture you on history, politics, philosophy, religion, or pretty much anything more complicated than red + yellow = orange. Not only are they largely uneducated outside a very narrow range of information, they’re not very intelligent either.

I’d love to see those same researchers assess the fundamental science knowledge of 500 biology professors at various colleges and universities across America. If Mr. Myers is a reliable guide, they won’t fare much better.