Category Archives: Science & Tech

Evolution and Bad Science

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Most of us with an interest in evolutionary biology understand that it is mostly a speculative science. Genetics takes some of the speculation out of it, but only a small part. The fossil record and materiel science helps, but there are huge gaps in the fossil record that leave huge gaps in our understanding of life in the long ago past. That does not mean it is not science or without loads of interesting data. It just means the the people in the field rely on inductive reasoning more than other fields.

That said, there’s informed speculation and then there’s crazy talk. This story crosses into crazy talk.

Mankind is undergoing a major evolutionary transition comparable to the shifts from prosimians to monkeys, monkeys to apes, and apes to humans, according to Cadell Last, a doctoral student in evolutionary anthropology and researcher at the Global Brain Institute.

Human life expectancy has already increased from about 45 at the start of the 20th century to 80 today. Because of advancements in technology, which will affect natural selection, Last suggests life expectancy could increase to 120 as early as 2050 — a concept known as radical life extension.

In addition to longer lives, humans will likely delay the timing of biological reproduction and reduce the number of offspring too, according to Last. Taken together, these changes could signify a new type of human, more focused on culture than biology.

Well, life expectancy has increased considerably, but that’s mostly due to a drop in human violence and a massive drop in childhood mortality. In 1900, getting killed by bandits was common in much of the world. Dying from the runs was also common. It does not mean we are living longer. People in the 18th century who were not murdered, killed in war or killed by the plague in youth lived into their sixties and seventies. Ben Franklin lived to 85. Augustus lived to 75. Tiberius lived to 79.

Fertility rates have been dropping in the west for a long time and no one has a good explanation. The cost of children is one argument, but children have always been a cost. Similarly, humans in the West have been having children later in life. That’s not new either. Taken together, it could be nothing more than a fad in the West that will go away in a generation or two. Jumping to the claims about new types of humans is nonsense.

Last makes his case in a paper from the most recent issue of Current Aging Science. Citing other futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Francis Heylighen, Last theorizes about human interaction with technology, relying on observations of past primate evolution and biology.

Ray Kurzweil is a good example of someone who can have a top-1% IQ and be crazy.

According to life history theory, natural selection shapes the length of an organism’s life and the timing of key events to produce the most surviving offspring. In the “fundamental life history trade-off,” organisms must choose between spending their time producing as many offspring as possible or rearing those offspring to make them as successful as possible, according to Last.

And as brain sizes increases, organisms require more energy and longer rearing time to reach their full potential.

Human brain size has gone down since human settlement. There’s no science to back the idea that bigger brains mean longer development cycles.

Based on these ideas, three major shifts in primate history have occurred toward longer lives and delayed reproduction: between prosimians and monkeys, monkeys and apes, and apes and humans.

Humans already dedicate the most time and energy toward nurturing offspring of any primate species, and this pattern is becoming only more extreme.

“Human life history throughout our species evolution can be thought of as one long trend towards delayed sexual maturation and biological reproduction (i.e., from ‘living fast and dying young’ to ‘living slow and dying old’),” Last writes.

While physical needs fueled previous evolutionary changes, cultural and technological innovations will drive the next shift, which has been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution.

Simply said, humans need more time to develop to take advantage of our complex world.

This is just Tofflerism wrapped in bad science. The pace of change may seem like it is accelerating, but we can’t know how the pace of change felt in 1930 or 1430. If you were alive in Bohemia in 1620, life was changing pretty damned fast.

Considering recent advancements like in-vitro fertilization, egg-freezing, and even adoption, the mechanics of biological reproduction have radically changed. “The biological clock isn’t going to be around forever,” Last says — or at least, people can turn it off or ignore it for a while.

Today, and even more so in the future, the success of individual and collective human life depends on knowledge and economic prosperity. Passing on new and important ideas to the next generation involves a process called cultural reproduction, which redirects time and energy toward cultural activities, as opposed to biological reproduction.

In the 19th century, what passed for futurists used to write about how the Industrial Revolution was radically altering humanity. H. G. Wells comes to mind. Marx was so convinced he founded one of the most destructive cults in human history. I would imagine that the spread of settlement probably included cranks claiming the advent of farming was the end times.

As far as a new type of human, that’s the lesson of the fossil record. No species sticks around for ever. Some have a nice long run and things change too fast for them to adapt. Then poof, they are nothing more than weird looking marks on a stone. Others come along have a relatively brief run and end up as nothing more than drawings on a cave wall. But, some species adapt and then adapt and then adapt again. When you’re in the drive through at KFC, you’re not thinking of T-Rex, but he is thinking of you, through the mists of time, leastways.

CSI Effect

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The term used to explain why 12 sensible people would acquit, despite witnesses and physical evidence, is the “CSI Effect.” That’s where juries expect conclusive scientific evidence like they see on TV. If they don’t get it, they assume the case is weak or the accused is innocent. It seems ridiculous, but we tend not to select the bets people for juries, as smart people duck their duties.

This story is another example of how television is warping the public’s ability to understand the world.

We’ve frequently talked about law enforcement and the intelligence community accessing and making use of cell site location data, which looks to figure out where people are based on what cell towers they’re connected to. Law enforcement likes to claim that it doesn’t need a warrant for such data, while the NSA has tested a pilot program recording all such data, and says it has the legal authority to collect it, even if it’s not currently doing so.

However, as anyone with even a basic geometry education recognizes, which cell tower you’re connected to does not give you a particularly exact location. It can be useful in putting someone in a specific (wide) area — or, much more useful in detailing where someone is traveling over long distances as they repeatedly switch towers in a particular direction. But a single reading does not give you particularly exact location details. I had naturally assumed that most people understood this — including law enforcement, lawyers, prosecutors and judges — but it turns out they do not. A rather depressing story in The Economist notes that, thanks to this kind of ignorance (combined with bogus cop shows on TV that pretend cell site data is good for pinpointing locations), cell site location data is frequently used to convict innocent people.

We should not expect the average person to understand how their gadgets work. Probably 90% of people have no understanding of their car’s engine and that technology has been with us for a long time. It is also much easier than cell phone technology or network technology. Cops are no brighter than the general public so they can’t be expected to know this stuff either. Prosecutors and judges have the power to take a man’s freedom away so that’s a problem.

SOMEONE strangled a prostitute in Portland, Oregon in 2002. The police arrested Lisa Roberts, the victim’s ex-lover, who spent more than two years in custody awaiting trial. Shortly before the trial the prosecutor told Ms Roberts, via her lawyer, that tower data collected by Verizon, her mobile-telephone network, showed precisely where she was at the time of the murder. As her lawyer recalled, the prosecutor said Ms Roberts could be “pinpointed” in a park shortly before the victim’s naked and sexually assaulted corpse was found there. She was told she faced 25 years to life in prison. She accepted a deal to plead guilty and serve 15 years.

But the high-tech evidence against her was bunk. Routinely collected tower data can place a mobile phone in a broad area, but it cannot “pinpoint” it. That would require a special three-tower “triangulation”, which cannot reveal past locations. It took a decade for Ms Roberts’s guilty plea to be thrown out. On May 28th she left prison, her criminal record clean, after nearly 12 years in custody.

The problem here is that even if the accused knew the DA was lying, she could not be sure the jury would understand that the DA was lying. The defense attorney probably lacked the knowledge and resources to fight it. That opens the door for the many crooked prosecutors to make claims about technology, like in this case, that are batshit crazy, but may fly with a jury or a gullible defendant.

This really points to a larger issue: people have this tendency to believe that technology can answer all questions. The NSA’s fetishism of surveillance via technology is an example of this. There’s data there, so it becomes all too tempting to assume that the data must answer any possible question (thus, the desire to collect so much of it). But the data and the interpretations it can lead to are often misleading or simply wrong. And that’s especially true when dealing with newer technologies or forms of data collection. That the criminal justice system could go decades without everyone recognizing the basic geometric limits of cell site location data based on a single cell is… both astounding and depressing. But it’s also a reminder that we shouldn’t assume that just because some evidence comes from some new-fangled data source it’s automatically legitimate and accurate.

This is why the NSA spying stuff is mostly bullshit. The government buys all of its technology from the private sector. There are things done for the government by private contractors that are not for anyone else, but the government does not have special magic. Further, the government is not getting the best and brightest. There’s way too much money to be made in the private sector for the government to get the best and brightest.

More important, the volume of data involved is so large there’s simply no way to sort through it in a meaningful way. There are 150 billion e-mails sent every day. That’s 55 trillion e-mails a year. Searching that volume of records for useful data is simply impractical. Throw in the 100 trillion or so phone calls and probably the same number of texts and the volume of data is well beyond what could be useful. That’s why they don’t try, but they’re fine letting people think it. The Feds are relying on the CSI effect to convince the world they can read your mind.

That Guy Again

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The interesting thing about the creationists and Intelligent Design advocates is they are not very Christian. They use Christian rhetoric from time time and make explicit religious appeals to people, but they are not in line with Scripture. In fact, they are almost pagan in their beliefs. This story that has been kicking around the neo-Christian sites is a pretty good example. The first sentence is a good starting point.

LANDMARK Adelaide research showing that sperm and eggs appear to carry genetic memories of events well before conception, may force a rethink of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, scientists say.

Creationists and ID’ers look at evolution as a cult. They assume Darwin holds the same place in the hearts of “evolutionists” as Jesus or the Bible holds for them. If Darwin is proven to be wrong in some way, then everything he said is false and the whole religion of evolution comes crashing down. After all, if the prophet is proved false his religion is proved false. The result of this thinking is an obsession on the part of ID’ers with Darwin and trying to discredit him.

The trouble is science does not work like religion. Darwin was wrong about a lot of things and he guessed about a lot of other things. He was also not the only guy working on these ideas. Genetics and the cracking open of the human genome have added more to evolutionary biology than Darwin. Newton was wrong about plenty of things, but that does not mean math is a false god. Science is the process of trial and error, with error leading to new discoveries.

But, the ID’ers can’t think that way. Their interest in the subject is not to gain a better understanding of the natural world. it is to defend their faith. That’s where the paganism creeps into the story. Traditional Christianity contains two key elements. One is that God is rational and the other is God is unknowable. God created the laws of nature and enforces them. They don’t change. God could change those laws, but he doesn’t because he keeps his word, literally and figuratively.

The latter, the unknowable part is where the new breed of Christian wanders off the reservation. They think they are having a personal relationship with Jesus. Traditional Christianity does not view Jesus as divine in the same way Greeks viewed Zeus as divine. Jesus was the word, God’s word, made flesh. If God were so inclined, he could have used a stick or a rock as his covenant with man. Jesus is the symbol through which God communicated his new covenant with mankind.

The neo-Christians into the Intelligent Design cause hold a different view. They see Jesus as their personal God in the same way a Roman would have a personal relationship with Apollo. Like the pagan gods, Jesus can and does intercede on man’s behalf when asked. This is why the wide receiver looks up and thanks Jesus after he scores a touchdown. The result is an occasionalist view of nature. If Jesus were so inclined, he could make the sky green and the grass purple.

In this regard, creationists are more honest that ID’ers. The creationist simply says the world is as described in their version of Genesis. They are not interested in knowing anything about their version of Genesis or the science of evolution. ID’ers on the other hand are only interested in evolution in order to come up with the right ritual to persuade their god to smite the evolutionist. They dream of a time when Jesus will defeat Darwin at the end times. That’s not science and it it barely qualifies as Christianity.

Statistics is not Science

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One of the worst things about the fake nerd movement is the belief that statistics are the same as science. Science certainly uses statistics for all sorts of things. Correlations can narrow the search for causal relationships. But, you have to use other tools to reveal those links. That’s no more obvious than in how the sabermetrics crowd completely missed the steroid era. Bill James, the godfather of baseball stat-nerds, was silent on the steroid era. You would think his spreadsheets would have revealed to him what everyone noticed from the stands.

This story on Grantland is another fin example of missing the forest for the trees.

One of the things that makes it such a joy to watch the Chicago Cubs’ rebuilding plan unfold is that the team’s approach is completely transparent. There’s no trickery here, no deceit, no super-secret process that’s inscrutable to everyone outside of the front office.

I don’t simply mean that the Cubs are rebuilding with complete conviction; under the terms of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, that’s really the only way to go.1 Nor do I mean that the Cubs are nearly the extremists that the Houston Astros are. I’m referring instead to the core principle with which the Cubs have been trying to build a championship roster since team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer were hired after the 2011 season, a principle that distinguishes this rebuilding project from almost every other one in baseball history: They’re building an offense from within and a pitching staff from spare parts.

This flies in the face of more than a century of conventional baseball wisdom, which states that (1) pitching wins championships, and (2) a team can never have too much pitching. The Cubs’ approach is completely counterintuitive. It’s also completely right.

Again, no mention of steroids. From World War II through the eighties, you followed a well known template to build your team. Power at the corners, defense up the middle, speed in the outfield. Mark Belanger could start at short on a title team with a .228 batting average. Elrod Hendricks could make a career as a catcher, despite a .220 career average. Pitching was a given. It was starts and innings you wanted from the rotation. That 1971 Oriole team had four starters account for 1080 innings.

Then the steroid era happened. Suddenly everyone in the lineup was a fearsome slugger. Pitchers were getting killed. That changed how teams looked at pitching. Getting hitters was easy. Getting pitchers that could give you 30 starts was rare. Every team shifted resources into getting and developing pitchers. Teams would draft nothing but pitchers some years. Technology was brought to bear to help pitchers compete with hitters who were jacked up on steroids.

Now, the steroids have gone away. The stat guys have not noticed, but front offices have noticed. The Red Sox traded four pitchers for hitters at the deadline. They just signed a Cuban slugger. The Cubs are doing the same thing. They traded their two best pitchers for hitters. Those teams that acquired the pitchers, by the way, are now struggling. Oakland has slumped and Detroit is fading. There’s plenty of pitching to be had these days. It is hitting that is rare.

We Be Stoopiderer

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One of the amusing parts of following the Ferguson riots was watching TV people turn themselves into pretzels avoiding the obvious. You’re simply not allowed to notice vast swaths of reality. When it comes to race, you could find yourself living in Steve Sailer’s basement if you slip and notice something. That makes reporting on human activity nearly impossible. This story is a good example.

Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade.  Opinion is divided as to whether the trend is long-term, but some researchers believe that humans have already reached intellectual peak.

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998. And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak. Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’.

This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named.

Now some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries – and that IQ scores are not just levelling out, but declining.

Scientists including Dr Flynn think better education can reverse the trend and point out the perceived decline could just be a blip. However, other scientists are not so optimistic.

Some believe the Flynn effect has masked a decline in the genetic basis for intelligence, so that while more people have been reaching their full potential, that potential itself has been declining.

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people.

Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential.

He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Dr Lynn predicts that if this trend continues, we could lose another 1.3 IQ points by 2050.

Michael Woodley, of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, claims people’s reactions are slower than in Victorian times, and has linked it to a decline in our genetic potential.

It has previously been claimed that quick-witted people have fast reactions and Dr Woodley’s study showed people’s reaction times have slowed over the century – the equivalent to one IQ point per decade.

Jan te Nijenhuis, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, says Westerners have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victoria Era.

He believes this is due to more intelligent women have fewer children than those who are less clever,The Huffington Post reported.

Dr Woodley and others think humans will gradually become less and less intelligent.

But Dr Flynn says if the decline in IQ scores is the end of the Flynn effect, scores should stabilise.

He thinks that even if humans do become more stupid, better healthcare and technology will mean that all people will have fewer children and the ‘problem’ will regulate itself.

The study referenced in the story does not appear to adjust for race. Logically, if you increase the number of people from low IQ populations, average IQ will fall, so the population explosion in Africa  probably accounts for most of it. But, you’re not allowed to point out that Arabs, for example, like marrying their cousins, which lowers IQ over a few generations. Britain is now 4% Arab and those Arabs account for a third of the genetic defects.

That said, maybe there is an adjustment for race in the study, but buried in such a way as to make is hard to notice. The researcher in question does not seem to be hobbled by political correctness, so who knows. We could be getting dumber and the dumb are out-breeding the smart. Both claims would be easy to accept, based on observation of Western societies and immigration.

War on STEM

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Progressives are not just obsessed with destroying competitors. They seem determined to pull down the pillars of civilization. Their destruction of the America health insurance system is a great example. There’s no reason to explain the mayhem they are causing, other than a desire to destroy. It is possible that it is just gross incompetence, but it sure looks deliberate. This piece in IBD the other day is a good example. All of these results were predicted and avoidable. Yet, here we are.

Another example is the continued assault on the STEM fields.

Tracy Van Houten has always been infatuated with space. Over the course of two decades and two degrees, that love took Houten from a pre-engineering class in high school to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she works as an aerospace systems engineer on groundbreaking projects like the Mars Curiosity Rover.

Like many female engineers, though, the 32-year-old mother of two has encountered challenges one might expect in a field where nearly 90% of professionals are men. Colleagues have occasionally asked Van Houten — sometimes the only woman in the room — to take notes during meetings and plan work parties. At times she feels her ideas aren’t acknowledged or heard.

Van Houten must also make difficult choices in order to juggle work and family — a balance male engineers may not feel as compelled to achieve. When her second child was a year old, she turned down the opportunity to join a team operating Curiosity once it landed on Mars, because of the grueling schedule.

A common assertion from feminists is that women have to make choices that men do not face. There’s never a mention of the reverse. Men certainly face choices women do not face. Both are a product of biological reality, but determined to be a social construct, because, well, you go girl.

Yet, Van Houten remains a dedicated engineer, and that’s not always common according to a new survey. For the past several years, two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have surveyed 5,300 women with degrees in engineering. They found that females frequently leave the profession because there aren’t enough opportunities for career advancement, or because they need to fulfill parenting or caregiving responsibilities in the absence of family-friendly work practices and policies.

The research indicates that leaning in to an engineering career may not lead to leadership prospects or a lifelong vocation, as women may hope. Instead, these women find themselves working for unfriendly or even hostile supervisors who show little interest in helping them advance professionally or designing a flexible work schedule to accommodate family obligations. The survey respondents also reported being discouraged by antiquated attitudes expressed by male colleagues and feeling isolated in a “male-centric” workplace.

Notice how men are supposed to accommodate women by “helping them advance professionally.” Maybe that’s good business. Maybe it is something a smart business owner should do. Who knows. What this is, however, is a childish demand by girls unprepared for the real world. Suck it up toots.

Women, in fact, comprise about 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female. In Fouad’s survey, a third of the women who left the field in the past five years did so to take care of children at home. Twelve percent reported a dearth of opportunities to advance in their career.

Engineering, for example, is not sales. The value of an engineer is cumulative. A woman who leaves her job for five years to raise kids is coming back to work, not just having missed five years of working. She is now behind the college grads in many cases. Her peers have advanced to supervisory positions. Odds are, the mom returning to work has better options outside of engineering.

To help both employees and their employers address these problems, SWE recently published a “playbook” that offers suggestions on how to better integrate work and personal commitments. Among the recommended policies are flexible scheduling practices, maternity and adoption leave, and on-site health and wellness resources.

Fouad, along with Bierman, believes that companies must start evaluating their policies for both sexes in order to effectively change attitudes in the workplace. As more men feel comfortable insisting on a sensible schedule, such requests will become the norm and not just the domain of female employees. Similarly, as more women view engineering as field that accommodates and encourages all of its professionals, they may increasingly join its ranks.

It’s not hard to see where this is going. The diversity rackets started the same way. First they sent out “helpful” play books. Then they sent out letters reading, “Nice company you have there. Too bad is something were to happen to it.” Not long after, the HR departments were flooded with women and minorities running diversity clinics. Jesse Jackson is out shaking down Silicon Valley. The more subtle types will be demanding engineering and technology firms start hiring girls – or else.

Put another way, it is convert, or else.

From the Mailbag

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The comment feature of this WordPress template is not the best. I chose this template because it is plain and easy to navigate. I hate overly complex sites with loads of web scripting. National Review and the Daily Caller are horrible to navigate because of the ridiculous scripts they have running, all intended to jam ads in your face. I went for simple and that means the commenting space is limited.

Readers have made some points I’d like to address so I figured a post addressing some of the comments would be worthwhile. Here are a few:

fodderwing writes:

There’s a big dif between having one’s questions answered and having them answered satisfactorily. That Fred is still asking is not necessarily evidence that he has ignored the “libraries full of books,” but may only be telling us that the books give unsatisfactory answers.

Satisfactorily to whom? It seems that millions of people have had no trouble finding the answers Fred says are elusive. John Derbyshire has addressed all of his points hundreds of times. Further, these answers are more than satisfactory to the people interested in evolutionary biology. They are, in many cases, axiomatic.

fodderwing continues:

I have my own unanswered questions about evolution, but the real lazy wusses in my view are the ones who get defensive when I ask. After reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box I thought it best to let him ask the hard questions, I would stick with the easy ones. I have read many answers to his “black box” concept, absolutely none of which seemed sincere or for that matter particularly well thought out. As for my easy questions, those are the ones that really frustrate people as the usual responses can probably best be summued up as “why can’t you just believe, man, like the rest of the smarter set? There is such overwhelming evidence, so many libraries full of books … “

If someone keeps asking you to explain why water is wet and ice is cold, you will begin to think that they are uncommonly stupid, have an agenda, or are passive-aggressively challenging your aptitude. If it is the first case, there’s only so many ways to explain something. Once you have exhausted them all, you give up. The world needs ditch diggers and hod carriers too.

If it is the other two, then you are dealing with a dishonest person. In both cases they are concealing their agenda, which is to sow doubt in your mind about your knowledge of the subject. This form of argumentation is common with the anti-science crowd, which makes it a campaign to spread ignorance. It is why the response from science these days when asked these sorts of questions is this.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it again. I have no quarrel with creationists or intelligent design people. These beliefs are not science, but the world will not spin off its axis of people believe that stuff. We get enough oogily-boogily from the Left and their war on science and reason. Christians would be wise to not follow their lead.

Bones writes:

Whatever else Fred is or isn’t, he isn’t a phoney. He’s always been upfront about his life. Fred comes from a mildly prominent Virginia family, but he was born in the coal mining town of Crumpler, West Virginia and spent a lot of his youth in rural West Virgina and Northern Alabama. He has a high regard for the people in the parts of Appalachia where he grew up. The ‘down home’ writing style he sometimes adopts is simply a literary device, used by people such as Joel Chandler Harris and many others.

Fred has an excellent command of the English language. He is making writing mistakes these days because he was hit in the face with shrapnel in Vietnam and his eyesight has deteriorated. He is now blind in one eye as the result of his latest eye surgery.

You may not like Fred or the stuff he writes. He may or may not know what he’s writing about. But ‘phoney’ is no more than name-calling

It is name-calling and I’m proud of my ability to use nouns. Without name calling, we would still be riding those big things in that place or whatever. I think Fred is a big phony and I have no qualms about saying it. At least you know where I stand.

I could be all wrong on that. Maybe his act is harmless and sincere. We all don a mask in public and maybe that’s just how Allah made him. I don’t know and I can’t know. All I can go on is what I see and my own sense of these things.

james wilson writes:

There are several factors. Jews, especially the ones you are describing, have no great affection for the country (I am increasingly sympathetic to that state of being). That being so they always have an exit strategy and a tradition of using it, so they continue to indulge their opinions–which are life itself to them–without restraint. And if the block is busted, well, they’ll once again be the first to sell. This strategy has worked well for them in recent times except for that miscalculation of 1933-45. But Montaigne wrote that even opinion is of force enough to make itself be espoused at the expense of life. No one contributes more to opinion than Jews, with less regard for the consequences.

A couple of points here. Steve Sailer points out frequently that Jews dominate certain industries and are wildly over represented in the millionaire and billionaire clubs. The thing is, Jews dominate transactional industries like the entertainment business, retail and the law. You don’t see a lot of Jews in construction, agriculture, mining or manufacturing. These are industries that require planning and investment to mitigate events currently over the horizon.

Is that cultural? Maybe. The old line was that Christians did not let Jews own property so they had no choice but to go into banking and commerce. That was always nonsense. Jews in Europe left the farm for the village 2,000 years ago. It is more likely the result of being a distinct minority that has often needed an exit strategy. Loading up the furniture and money is a lot easier than packing up the cattle or the fame land.

The other point is the Jewish relationship with the state. This has often been the justification for persecuting Jews. They were accused of dual loyalties, with loyalty to the tribe overriding all else. If you look at the world today, that seems like a shrewd position. Being an American citizen carries little value. Abroad it is a burden and home it is becoming a liability. We treat illegal alien invaders better than our own poor.

The Jews seem to have it right. Governments and countries come and go. Why sacrifice for a concept that has so little utility? America may have been a special place long ago, but today it is just a slab of land with a bunch of people living in it. It’s every tribe for himself, so to speak, whether we like it or not. Only a fool clings to his patriotism these days.

Deck writes:

The second law of thermodynamics puts the lie to evolution. Evolution is atheistic dogma dressed up as science, nothing more. Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God.” The vituperation coming out of Pisco shows Fred hit a nerve. Read, In The Beginning by Walt Brown.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy. Put another way, the natural process is for the complex to decay into the simple. The final result is complete randomness.

This is a popular misappropriation of physical science to biological science. This line of argument has been addressed many times in many places. Here’s one I found just by entering “second law of thermodynamics” in a search engine. The fact that it remains popular with creationists underscores my point about Fred Reed. There’s no amount of facts and reasoning that will ever satisfy the creationist. Therefore, why would I or anyone else bother trying?

Denmark is full of Danes

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Imagine a group of people that deeply believe in the Great Pumpkin. So much so, they have not only developed a religion and culture around it, everything that defines them is based in the existence of the Great Pumpkin. Their culture and social structures would collapse if they discovered the Great Pumpkin was myth. The news is full of people who would die for their religion so this should not be a terribly difficult thought experiment.

Now, flip around the other way. Imagine a group of people that have based everything about their existence on the belief that the Great Pumpkin does not exist. Unlike atheists, these people have actually managed to build a viable culture and institutions around the absolute faith in the Great Pumpkin being a myth. Everything they are is based on it. Tolerance for any Great Pumpkin-ism is impossible because it is essentially a denial of their essence.

Now, let’s assume these people know of one another and are within travel distance of one another. The former group, let’s call them the Positives, are going to be hell bent on converting the latter group, that we’ll call the Negatives. On the other hand, the Negatives are not interested in converting the Positives. The mere fact that these people are able to tolerate Great Pumpkin belief means they are capable of denying everything that makes up the very being of a Negative. Therefore, part of the Negative belief set is they want to destroy the Positives.

Now, replace the Great Pumpkin with race.

That’s where things stand in America when it comes to race. Most people accept that race is a real thing and different people come from different parts of the world. For most people, it is a casual awareness that does not animate their life. They think about it when they see a sign for Martin Luther King Boulevard or a bunch of a Spanish guys hanging out on the corner. Others take it more seriously as an academic or intellectual pursuit, while others take it too far and become bigots.

The other side of the fence we find the race deniers. Everything they believe, their sense of self and their world view, is based on race being a myth. The trouble is they are facing a mountain of scientific evidence that contradicts their belief. The mountain is not only growing, it is growing rapidly. Studies like this one seem benign to normal people, but they are a stake through the heart of a race denier.

Economists at the University’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) have looked at why certain countries top the world happiness rankings. In particular they have found the closer a nation is to the genetic makeup of Denmark, the happier that country is. The research could help to solve the puzzle of why a country like Denmark so regularly tops the world happiness rankings.

Dr Eugenio Proto and Professor Andrew Oswald, based in the Department of Economics, found three forms of evidence for a link between genetic makeup and a nation’s happiness.

Firstly they used data on 131 countries from a number of international surveys including the Gallup World Poll, World Value Survey and the European Quality of Life Surveys. The researchers linked cross-national data on genetic distance and well-being.

Dr Proto said: “The results were surprising, we found that the greater a nation’s genetic distance from Denmark, the lower the reported wellbeing of that nation. Our research adjusts for many other influences including Gross Domestic Product, culture, religion and the strength of the welfare state and geography.

The second form of evidence looked at existing research suggesting an association between mental wellbeing and a mutation of the gene that influences the reuptake of serotonin, which is believed to be linked to human mood.

Dr Proto added: “We looked at existing research which suggested that the long and short variants of this gene are correlated with different probabilities of clinical depression, although this link is still highly debated. The short version has been associated with higher scores on neuroticism and lower life satisfaction. Intriguingly, among the 30 nations included in the study, it is Denmark and the Netherlands that appear to have the lowest percentage of people with this short version.”

The final form of evidence looked at whether the link between genetics and happiness also held true across generations, continents and the Atlantic Ocean.

Professor Oswald said: “We used data on the reported wellbeing of Americans and then looked at which part of the world their ancestors had come from. The evidence revealed that there is an unexplained positive correlation between the happiness today of some nations and the observed happiness of Americans whose ancestors came from these nations, even after controlling for personal income and religion.”

For the race deniers, this is like seeing the Great Pumpkin walking down the strete in full view of everyone. This study is not abstract correlations. This is hard genetic science. More important, if a small localized population of humans in the heart of Europe can have some weird genetics that manifest in personality and culture, groups walled off from Europe by oceans and mountains are going to have even more unusual mutations that distinguish them from the rest.

The race deniers will be undone by the fact Denmark is full of Danes.

Fake Science

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The documenting of junk science is hardly new. I recall reading skeptics taking on nonsense studies back in the 1980’s. I’m old and my mind is slipping, but I think the term “junk science” was in use back then, but I may be misremembering. Alar is probably the first example I recall reading about, where the “science” turned out to be complete nonsense. DDT is the most famous example.

Still, the debunking of pseudo-science has a long history. It is generally tangled up in some cause, claiming to be about fending off an emergency. Anthropomorphic Global Warming is looking like the Godzilla of all junk science. Everything about it is fanciful, even the labels. The shadow of Rachel Carson will be with us forever.

The rise of the fake nerd has only made it worse. Fake nerds, as I have written about before, are all around us these days. Pretending to be “tech savvy” or really into technology is one part of it. Another is the use and abuse of statistics. The sporting press is being over run by guys with a couple of stat classes, carrying on like they are Bill James. Nate Silver is making a career out of it.

The mistake all of these guys make is in thinking statistics are science. Science uses statistics, but it also uses hammers and blow torches too. No one calls a carpenter a scientist or a geek, yet the typical carpenter is more empirically minded than most of these nerds. He understands cause and effect. He also understands that correlations can be misleading, so they must be treated with care.

Anyway, fake science has become the religion of the fake nerd cult. Take any amount of wishful thinking, slap on some statistics, scientific jargon and you have catnip for the fake nerds. This story is a great example.

The human race is really starting to feel the consequences of their actions. One area we are waking up to is the massive amount of pesticides we spray (especially in North America) on our food that has not only been linked to human disease, but a massive die off in the global bee population within the past few years.

A new study out of Harvard University, published in the June edition of the Bulletin of Insectology puts the nail in the coffin, neonicotinoids are killing bees at an exponential rate, they are the direct cause of the phenomenon labeled as colony collapse disorder (CCD). Neonicotinoid’s are the world’s most widely used insecticides.

Right away you see one of the hallmarks of fake science. That’s the apocalyptic warnings about humans living better than they deserve. In this case, it is the use of chemicals to ward off horrible plagues and produce more food.  Then you have the “case is closed” assertion that tells you the case is anything but closed. The fact that science is an ongoing debate is lost on the fake nerds.

For this study, researchers examined 18 bee colonies at three different apiaries in central Massachusetts over the course of a year. Four colonies at each apiary were regularly treated with realistic doses of neonicotinoid pesticides, while a total of six hives were left untreated. Of the 12 hives treated with the pesticides, six were completely wiped out.

This is an example of the classic logical fallacy they used to teach kids back in the olden times. It goes like this. If A then B, therefore if B then A. This is the error of affirming the consequent. In this case, overuse of this pesticide results in fragile bee colonies. There may be many reasons for fragile bee colonies. At best, this study suggest there may be a relationship between pesticides and fragile bee colonies.

Real scientists, like this guy, understand that there can be many causes to a single observed phenomenon. Those causes can interact with one another to mask and amplify their effects. Teasing out the true causal relationships is difficult. Correlations can help locate causes, but they often lead us down a blind alley. That’s the plight of the fake nerd. They believe they are empirically minded, but fall for this sort of nonsense all the time. The result is a flood of junk science.

The Threat of VGM

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Anything to do with the climate now has such a bad odor that most people just assume all of it is a hoax. Years of lying to people about global warming have discredited the field in the eyes of the public. That and the true believers are nut. It turns out that the real threat was never humans. It is volcanoes!

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.

UTA researchers used radar techniques to map water flows under ice sheets and estimate the rate of ice melt in the glacier. As it turns out, geothermal heat from magma and volcanoes under the glacier is much hotter and covers a much wider area than was previously thought.

“Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers,” UTA researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geothermal heat under the glaciers is likely a key factor in why the ice sheet is currently collapsing. Before this study, it was assumed that heat flow under the glacier was evenly distributed throughout, but UTA’s study shows this is not the case. Heat levels under the glacier are uneven, with some areas being much hotter than others.

We have always been at war with Volcanic Global Warming.