Tag: science

An out-of-date evolutionist

David Sloan Wilson not only presents a fallacious and remarkably self-serving analogy for our edification, he also demonstrates why most scientists should probably stay very far away from logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. In the process of launching an inept attack on the potential legitimacy of creationism, he shows that he is neither up on the present state of science nor able to reach a correct logical conclusion from the facts on hand:

Imagine playing chess with someone who insists on continuing after his king has been taken. Or imagine a basketball game where the losing team insists on continuing after the final buzzer has sounded. These vignettes are so absurd that if they actually happened we would regard the protesters as insane. Yet something comparable happens all time when creationists protest that it is unfair for them to be ignored–including some recent comments on my blog.

The idea that it is unfair to be declared a loser and to be made to retire from the field profoundly misunderstands the nature of fairness in all contest situations. Science is a contest situation, no less than chess or basketball. In the ideal scientific contest, alternative hypotheses make different predictions that can be tested with empirical observations. When the predictions of a hypothesis are not confirmed, it is declared a loser and is made to retire from the field. New hypotheses are always welcome to enter the competition, including modified versions of rejected hypotheses, but science without losers would be as pointless as chess without checkmate and basketball without the final buzzer….

Nevertheless, the scientific contest does result in the accumulation of durable knowledge. The earth is extremely old. Continents do drift. Species are descended from other species. Those who claim otherwise and demand that it is only fair to be heard are either deluded or cynically making a manipulative argument, a point to which I will return below.

Now, Mr. Wilson is certainly free to respond or not respond to whomever he likes on his blog and I have little doubt that he is tired of shooting down the same arguments from fourth-rate, ankle-biting creationists over and over again. I certainly get bored with hearing the same ignorant and illogical arguments put forth in such a tiresome manner by the fourth-rate evolutionists who infest the Internet. But that does not justify Mr. Wilson’s attempt to claim that he is acting fairly when he is not or his pretense that science is something it quite clearly is not.

If you actually know what you’re doing, it’s no problem shooting down the invalid arguments presented by the clueless and the uninformed. When they’re presented again, as they surely will be, simply point them to the previous smackdown. But if you really don’t, well, you’re not fooling anyone by claiming that you’re too busy, important, or credentialed to deny them taking their best shot, hapless as it might be.

Now, Wilson’s imagined sporting vignettes are indeed absurd, but they are not legitimately comparable. Let’s first consider the accuracy of his analogy. Most sports and games have clear-cut rules to which both sides are equally subject, a definite authority, more or less impartial referees, and are based primarily upon ability rather than credentials. Sporting competitions end when the clock runs out or a specific and predetermined event happens. Science, on the other hand, has no rules, no definite authority, extremely partial referees to the extent that “peer review” can even be considered refereeing rather than gatekeeping, and operates on a hierarchical, credential-based paradigm that makes no allowances for talent and would exclude most of the great uncredentialed scientists of the past. Not only do scientific “competitions” never end, logic dictates they cannot possibly end insofar as science is supposedly dedicated to “the accumulation of durable knowledge” and the possibility of new information exists.

In other words, science is observably so intrinsically unfair to those both inside and outside the profession that it makes the old Jordan Rules look like a paragon of fair competition. To claim that scientific contests, ideal or sub-optimal, are in any way comparable to a basketball game or a chess match is so demonstrably false that it requires either willful stupidity, careless error, or the cynical manufacture of a manipulative and invalid argument. Which would it be, Mr. Wilson?

Wilson somehow manages to not only commit Daniel Dennett’s error in his Doctrine of Transitive Doxasticism, but goes Dennett one better by appealing to scientage (the knowledge base of science) rather than one specific disciplinary application of scientody (quantum electrodynamics). Following a classic Dawkinsian bait-and-switch in which he brings up “the ideal scientific contest” in which “alternative hypotheses make different predictions that can be tested with empirical observations” in order to defend his quasi-scientific discipline wherein inferences take the place of testable predictions and empirical observations, Wilson then commits a logical blunder of Harrisian proportions when he cites the historical dismissal of group selection without realizing that it makes precisely the opposite case from the one that he is attempting to make.

Sloan states that the evolutionary revival of the concept of group selection, which was considered to be as much of a scientific loser as the phlogiston and Lamarckism for nearly 50 years, is evidence that the scientific playing field is fair even if it can become, in Wilson’s own words, “highly uneven”. However, the group selection example completely undercuts the original argument that a scientific contest is comparable to a sporting contest by demonstrating that there is no buzzer in science. Are we to conclude that there is a 50-year post-buzzer grace period and that Creationism has missed the scientific statute of limitations? Apparently not, as Wilson goes on to admit that there is no final buzzer. But since there is not, then what is the logical basis for Wilson’s division between the legitimate revival of group selection and the illegitimate revival of Creationism?

Wilson confesses that there are perfectly good scientific hypotheses that can be derived from the concept of an intervening creator god. What he fails to admit is that the concept has provided scientific successes as well as failures; the defeat of the “steady-state universe” by Georges Lemaître’s “Big Bang theory” as the standard cosmological model was a huge victory for the Creationists, whose concept of a universal beginning was once dismissed by Wilson’s predecessors in the way that Wilson now dismisses other, less necessary aspects of the God hypothesis.

More importantly, Wilson reveals himself to be out-of-date with regards to the latest scientific evidence on the unreliability of science itself. His “uneven playing field” does not even begin to take into account scientific fraud, the decline effect, publication bias, selective reporting, and the long, sordid history of scientific facts that have been disproven over time by scientists and non-scientists alike. In fact, the more that even the hardest sciences are examined with the same skeptical lens that the likes of Dawkins would prefer to keep focused only on religion, the more it becomes obvious that his faith in it is badly misplaced.

For example, Wilson states that “The earth is extremely old. Continents do drift. Species are descended from other species.” And yet, the scientific evidence for these statements is much weaker, scientifically speaking, than the evidence for medical science that is not experimentally disadvantaged due to the daunting challenges of replicating historical events. So, the fact that “80 percent of non-randomized studies turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials” means that it is not only possible, but downright probable, that his statements will eventually turn out to be wrong.

Wilson’s attitude and his attempt to sound a buzzer that does not exist in order to declare the game over are both profoundly unscientific. It is not only more unscientific than the behavior of the creationists that he decries, it is actually dogmatic anti-science. The ironic thing is that Wilson isn’t even doing science when he engages in his customary evolutionary speculation, but rather fiction and philosophy because there is virtually no scientific evidence for natural selection, as leading researchers in the field such as Masatoshi Nei of Penn State readily admit.

(The idea that natural selection is the cause of evolution is a perfectly reasonable logical argument, but that’s all it is to date. Despite the oft-heard explanation that polar bears are white due to natural selection, no scientist has ever gone out there and painted polar bears pink, red, and yellow in order to produce evidence that colored polar bears are any less fit than white ones. It’s taken evolutionists more than 150 years to realize this, but now even Richard Dawkins is referring to a theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection and evolutionary researchers like Nei are attempting to retroactively find the evidence that they errantly took for granted all along.)

In fact, the one thing that we can predict with a high degree of certainty about Wilson’s field based upon its past record is that its “durable knowledge” will prove incorrect. Biology is arguably the only science that is more reliably off-base than economics; just last week the discovery of homo sapiens fossils in Israel appears to have once more upended the state of evolutionary scientage. And note that simply calling the consistent unreliability of science “self-correcting” does not turn the bug into a feature, especially since a good part of the “self”-correction comes from outside the scientific community.

A more accurate analogy would have been for Wilson to describe science as a collection of annoying fat kids who declare themselves the world champions of Foosketball, then refuse to define the rules or let anyone else play lest they be exposed, pinned down, and defeated. Despite their academic credentials, scientists are no more to be permitted special pleading than priests. Mr. Wilson’s inability to reach correct logical conclusions coupled with his stated refusal to entertain alternative hypotheses does not speak well for his scientific perspective, so it’s probably just as well for everyone that he works in a field where no actual use of the scientific method is required.

Update: Amy Alkon also posted on Wilson’s post. I left a comment there which I imagine a few of you will find more amusing than she does as the woman is in well over her head and makes what we have all come to recognize as the expected atheist errors. Seriously, what is with atheists and their inability to understand or utilize common word definitions? Not reading the Bible or other religious texts I understand, but what do they have against dictionaries?

The failure of empiricism

Ironically, even as the atheistic cult of science fetishism vehemently insists that only science is capable of determining truth and now even morality, genuine scientists are gradually coming to realize that the scientific method is not only incapable of being the sole arbiter of truth, it isn’t even capable of dependably producing consistent scientific evidence when it is properly utilized:

The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers….

The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise.

Murray Rothbard was an agnostic who repeatedly made the conclusive logical case against empiricism. It applied not only to economics and the Samuelsonian empiricism that presently serves as the basis for modern mainstream economics, but the basic concept of empiricism in general. Yet despite the decades-old Rothbardian case, the science cult continues to ignorantly insist that the only reason anyone could ever possibly doubt empiricism is religious dogmatism, thereby proving Rothbard’s point. Between scientific fraud, the decline effect, publication bias, selective reporting, and the long, verifiable history of disproven scientific assertions, it is astonishing that anyone would still attempt to argue that science is a reliable arbiter of anything outside a very narrow range of applied hard disciplines, let alone the only one that merits use.

And some still doubt that God has a sense of humor.

People aren’t people

This new genetic analysis has a lot of interesting implications for everyone from equalitarians and evolutionists to theologians and racialspecies supremacists, given that it is increasingly obvious that not only are all human beings not equal under the skin, strictly speaking, they are not even all homo sapiens:

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea. All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

This discovery underlines the utter foolishness of placing one’s faith in science in any of its three aspects as anything but a very interesting and powerful tool. Not only is scientage never anything more than a mere snapshot in time, but it very seldom expands in the predictable and progressive manner so often envisioned by those who subscribe to what Rothbard described as the “Whig theory of the history of science”.

Science has now reached a point where it can inform us that one group of people are less genetically evolved and less human than another group. What it cannot do is tell us how one group should treat another group, it can only help us determine how our predecessors decided to behave in the past. The uncomfortable reality for those who hope to rely upon science for their moral touchstone is that one can as easily construct a science-based case for eliminating the Denisovian genes as restoring them entirely.

Science assignment: Provide a science-based justification for either a) eliminating Denisovian genes from the human race or b) restoring the Denisovians as a genetically pure and distinct species.

Honesty in pseudo-science

Professional anthropologists have finally admitted they just don’t do science. So it’s only a matter of time before the sociologists and evolutionary biologists admit that they don’t either. And even the ghost of Keynes would have to admit that whatever economists are doing these days, it can’t reasonably be described as science:

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.

The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

I don’t quite agree with the NYT’s characterization of this debate between “science-based” anthropologists and ideological anthropologists. Neither side are actually engaged in doing any science per se due to the historical nature of their discipline; “study” is not synonymous with “scientific experiment”. Neither history nor logic are scientody, although both are often utilized by scientists engaged in it.

But this does underline the importance of properly defining what the various aspects of science are and are not. So long as scientists and other ideologists are determined to pronounce judgment on what is and is not science and attempt using “science” as an excuse to interfere in the political arena, non-scientists have a responsibility to force them to strictly abide by consistent definitions. This is why it is always important to determine whether someone us bandying about the term “science” in the sense of scientage, scientody, or scientistry.

Mr. Sailer has his own take on the situation.

Neuroscience is racist

It looks like Sam Harris is going to be very, very disappointed where the science of brain imaging experiments looks to be headed:

Following up on the cultural differences between Asians and Americans, one study published in Neuroimage found that when faced with the same image, people’s neural responses are totally different. Scientists found that when American subjects viewed a silhouette in a dominant posture (standing up, arms crossed) their brain’s reward circuitry sparked. Not so for Japanese subjects. For the Japanese, their reward circuitry fired when they saw a submissive silhouette (head down, arms at sides). This physiological response matches a well-known behavioral difference: Americans favor and encourage dominant behavior. Japanese culture reinforces submissive culture.

So, instead of neuroscience providing a scientific means of defining morality outside of religion, it looks as if it will be providing a scientific means of defining racial and/or cultural superiority outside of morality. All of Harris’s reasoning in support of scientific morality, which was constructed in support of his hypothesis of differences in religious and non-religious beliefs and put forth in The Moral Landscape, can now quite reasonably be utilized in support of scientific racial and cultural superiority.

How fortunate for everyone that his reasoning is so completely flawed.

Inherit the Science

Smarmy evolutionists and socially handicapped atheists almost invariably bring up the Scopes trial when confronting religious individuals or anyone skeptical about the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection. Of course, as is reliably the case, they know next to nothing about it, it is merely a social marker upon which they’ve learned to place importance in the course of their cultural indoctrination. Jonah Goldberg brings to our attention a few of the more interesting aspects of the science that the defenders of the secular faith still deem so vital to teach in public schools:

“The Races of Man. – At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest race type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America….

Improvement of Man. – If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

Eugenics. – When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.”

The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
– George William Hunter, A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (New York, 1914): pp. 193-196, 253-254, 261-263.

So, the next time someone smirks and brings up Scopes, the monkey trial, or Inherit the Wind in an attempt to assume a posture of scientific superiority, don’t forget to ask them which aspect of elementary biology they deem the most important to teach to American schoolchildren, the mechanism of natural selection, the moral imperative of artificial selection, the criminalization of unfit breeding, the forcible placement of the inferior in asylums, or the supremacy of the white race.

“Science” vs History

I have to admit, Scott Locklin identifies the invention of science long before I had imagined; I always assumed that it was considered to have begun with Galileo, the so-called Father of Science. Of course, neither scenario fits at all well with the revisionist history of the atheist secularists and their passionate attachment to the ridiculous idea that science and religion are intrinsically at odds:

Pope Benedict’s trip to Ole Blighty is over, and that sanctimonious gasbag Dawkins didn’t manage to arrest him in the name of secular humanism. While I’m not a believer myself, I often wonder at such professional atheists who cover themselves in the mantle of “science.” Don’t they know any history?

What we refer to today as “science” is something which was invented by humans, rather than springing forth from Jove’s forehead in some ancient time before time. There is a definite date before which there was no science and a date after which there was science. This isn’t controversial or mysterious: We know exactly when it happened, and some of the original manuscripts which invented science and modern thought still exist….

History’s first scientist was Robert Grosseteste, although his work is little known in popular education today. He was born in 1170 or so to a humble Suffolk family. He found his calling in the Catholic Church, as important a source of social mobility then as the university system is now. It was Grosseteste who formulated the first description of the scientific process. He was the first European in centuries to study Aristotle’s works and the first to study Arab natural philosopher Abu Ibn al-Haytham’s writings. From these thinkers he developed the idea of “composition and resolution,” which is the scientific method in itself.

Interesting. And of course, as we know from other areas of their demonstrated ignorance, the short answer is: no, the professional atheists don’t know any history. And as a general rule, when science and history happen to conflict, it’s usually wise to bet on history.

Science commits suicide

This news strikes me as something that could lead to the exposure and eventual defunding of a great deal of the chicanery involved in the “climate science” scam. Only a group of intellectually isolated individuals who highly overrate their ability to influence the public would be so foolish as to transform themselves into political activists this way:

Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday’s election.

The ineptness of their strategy is visible in their choice to not only abandon their home turf, but attack the very individuals who are presently providing them with most of their funding. I’m delighted to see it, of course, because it is obvous that their so-called science isn’t actually scientific and this attempt to is only going to lead to more scrutiny and less funding of the global warming gravy train.

Moreover, it will likely lead to a long-overdue diminishing of the public’s respect for science and scientists as the latter reveal their total ignorance of matters they consider to be insignificant such as economics, democracy, and human liberty. Scientists are technocratic totalitarians dependent upon government for the most part; note that both the National Socialists and the Soviet Communists historically enjoyed a good deal of support in the scientific community and few scientists had any qualms about working for such evil masters. [Science fetishists are encouraged to make their usual argument about Lysenko here.] Scientists have their uses, but only a madman or a fool would want to allow them any significant influence in government.

Speaking of climate change and economics, the market has spoken:

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Good riddance indeed. As if the global economy isn’t already facing a dauntingly high degree of difficulty.

IP is book burning

Jeffrey Tucker explains how IP reduces the store of human knowledge:

Last week, I had to haggle with an authors’ consortium in Britain concerning a 1946 text. The author had no children and he died before the copyright on the book expired. Someone swept in a renewed the thing, thereby taking it off the market. It hasn’t been in print for some 40 years. A paralegal helped me discover the owner, which turns out to be some scam operation that preys on people who want to reprint books. I asked to distribute the thing online. The consortium never seem to have heard of the internet. They wanted a fee for $1 per book with a contract that lasted 2 years and a limit on our sales. None of this works for us. So we said no. As a result, the book, which is not that mission critical, goes back to its eternal resting place, all because of “intellectual property” which is just so obviously a hoax and a violation of human rights.

This is only one of dozens of cases I’ve dealt with. And there are actually millions of books in this condition, effectively burned and destroyed by IP law.

The amount of human knowledge that is being lost to future generations thanks to IP law is really disturbing. Since scientage, or “the body of scientific knowledge” is one of the tripartite aspects of science, science fetishists who habitually fulminate about an incipient “new Dark Ages” should really spend a lot less time worrying that illiterate and innumerate children run the risk of not having TE(p)NS talked over their ignorant heads and a lot more about the disappearance of information that was published in the past. Lest you think there is nothing valuable to be learned from keeping the words of dead authors alive, consider the cost of this temporary loss of this insignificant tidbit of scientage.

I don’t feel your pain

Empathy Quotient Test
Your score: 23

That was a little surprising, considering the results from that Asperger’s Quotient test a bunch of us took two or three years ago. I suppose this indicates that despite possessing a normal ability to read other people, I can’t be bothered most of the time. Actually, that sounds about right.

So take the test and report back. Or not. I am reliably informed that I don’t much care.