Category: Science

Miraculous You

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If you are ever discouraged by failure or the disadvantages you face in life, consider what the odds were against you ever existing:

Scientists calculated the probability of your existing as you, today, at about one in 400 trillion . . .  Some factors taken to reach this figure include the chances of your biological parents meeting and mating, probability of fertilization, and the survival rate of a fertilized egg.

Your mere existence is in some sense miraculous, and the fact that you are alive today and able to read this is testimony to your ability to overcome enormous odds. You are a survivor, and all your ancesters were survivors, too, or otherwise you wouldn’t even be alive today. Not only do you exist, but you are literate and have access to the amazing technology of the Internet, which empowers you in ways that your ancestors never could have imagined. You have enormous opportunities, and there is no reason to despair. No matter what disappointments you may experience in life, never quit. Never surrender. Never lose hope.

You’re already a winner. Science proves it.





 

Atheist Creep @RichardDawkins Destroying His Own Reputation

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“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.”
— Romans 1: 18-19 (KJV)

Three days ago, I took notice of how notorious atheist Richard Dawkins had grossly offended many liberals with his Twitter rants about rape and pedophilia. One is reminded of last year’s atheist sex scandals which involved, among other things, Professor Lawrence Krauss’s defense of the billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Such is his appetite for self-destruction that Richard Dawkins is now being denounced by a feminist columnist in the Guardian:

Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins proving that if non-conscious material is given enough time, it is capable of evolving into an obstreperous crackpot who should have retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself. . . .
This is Dawkins in 2014: a figure of mockery, a man so convinced that he possesses God-like powers of omniscience that he can’t understand why everyone’s getting angry at him for pointing out the obvious. Why won’t we all just learn how to think, damn it! . . .
Remember when Dawkins was widely respected? . . . I don’t. Having grown up after Dawkins made the transition from lauded science communicator to old man who shouts at clouds, it’s hard for me to understand why anyone continues to listen to him about anything.

Dawkins made his reputation as a “lauded science communicator” on the basis of his selfish arrogance, and is now destroying himself because of that same trait. Dawkins was embraced by liberals, so long as he limited his attacks to Christians. Now that he’s offending Muslims and feminists, however, Dawkins gets no love:

It’s hard to deny that Dawkins’s ‘secular fundamentalism’ — as liberal commentators now describe it — makes for an embarrassing spectacle. When enraged pensioners pick fights with total strangers, one’s natural reaction is to go and sit somewhere else on the bus.
But Dawkins was just as offensive when his target was Christianity; it’s just that the Left didn’t have a problem with his description of Pope Benedict XVI as a ‘leering old villain in the frock’ who ran ‘a profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution … amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.’
As I said at the time, that article — in the Washington Post, no less — ‘conjures up the image of a nasty old man who’s losing his marbles. It’s not very nice about the Pope, either.’ But Dawkins has not become any crazier in the intervening four years; he’s simply widened his attack on blind faith, as he sees it, to include Muslims and feminists.

Da Tech Guy points out that atheism is not random in its hostility to religion. Atheism has a teleology — a purpose, an inherent goal — having developed in the West as a means of undermining the social and legal authority of Christian morality. Atheism is therefore not equally hostile to all religious beliefs, nor is it objective in its selection of targets.

People who hate Christianity nowadays declare themselves “atheists” in much the same way as people who hate America once declared themselves “Communists.” For that matter, it’s the same way women who hate men call themselves “feminists.” The claimed label is a means of rationalizing one’s hatred in a self-flattering way, by distinguishing one’s own enlightened sophistication in contrast to those whom one ridicules as ignorant simpletons for their traditional beliefs.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Nearly 2,000 years later, this verdict still condemns them.





 

Being an Atheist Is Bad. Being an Obnoxious Atheist Is Worse.

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Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) is inarguably obnoxious:

Prominent atheist and professional provocateur Richard Dawkins has sparked a fierce debate on Twitter after he classified certain types of rape and paedophilia as “worse” and milder than others.
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think,” Dawkins tweeted on Tuesday morning.
He had earlier tweeted: “X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.”
He followed it up with: “Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.”

Am I the only one who notices that Dawkins was not merely demonstrating a logical principle, but that both of his examples were attempts to diminish the wrongness of sexual crimes? That is to say, if he had merely wished to demonstrate the principle, he could have said, “Armed robbery is bad. Murder is worse,” etc. But he didn’t do that, did he? No, it is specifically in the area of sex offenses that The Great Darwinian insists that we must learn to see gradations of moral relativity.

He insists that we mere mortals have misunderstood his genius.

 

Call Me Old-Fashioned, But …

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. . . as the father of six children, the standard method of procreation has always seemed to me both efficient and fun.

Others, however, consider the natural way of baby-making to be too messy and unscientific, and so Progress demands a Brave New World of “reproductive technology,” about which Alexis Madigral of The Atlantic enthusiastically cheers. Synthetic gametes? Excuse my skepticism, Doctor Frankenstein, but I still prefer the messy natural way.

 

‘Population Bomb’ Author Predicts Cheerful Future of Cannibalism

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Long ago utterly discredited by the falsehood of his “overpopulation” prophecies, Paul Ehrlich is still taken seriously by liberals. He went on HuffPo Live this week to warn that the depletion of natural resources means soon we’ll be forced to “eat the bodies of your dead,” et cetera:

In addition to being full of wild predictions, Ehrlich was prepared to lay extensive blame on Republicans and the media. He accused “every state legislature” of waging a “war on women” and a “war on the environment.” In addition, he blamed former President Ronald Reagan of “stealing from the poor” — all the pro-forma stuff you have to say to make sure of being invited back on HuffPo Live.
Ehrlich viciously attacked pro-life Americans, somehow accusing them of “trying to kill women by making abortion illegal.” Instead, he called for “backup abortions” for any woman who’s birth control failed, in an attempt to control “breeding,” as he put it.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Donald Douglas at American Power observes that, even while the Left’s “scientific” experts are exposed as fools, the fanatic Amanda Marcotte accuses the Right of waging a war on science.

 

The Science Is Settled?

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Definition of intellectual: Someone who presumes to judge, outside the field of their own expertise, who qualifies as an “expert”:

Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio came under attack this week for refusing to submit to scientific authority. “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he said in an interview with Jonathan Karl.
Nonscientist Ruth Marcus, writing for the Washington Post, declared that Rubio’s words “undermine his other assertion,” namely “that he is prepared to be president.” Juliet Lapidos, also lacking in scientific expertise, went so far as to assert, in a New York Times blog post, that Rubio had “disqualified himself” from the presidency. . . .
[T]hey’re entirely typical of the genre of global-warmist opinion journalism, in which ignorant journalists taunt politicians for their ignorance but have no argument beyond an appeal to authority. . . .
Appeals to authority aren’t necessarily fallacious, except in the realm of formal deductive logic, where they entail adopting the unfounded premise that the authority is infallible. . . .

Read the whole thing. Conservatives are often accused of being “anti-intellectual” for the very reason that we are suspicious of the kind of “expertise” which demands that we accept tendentious claims without criticism, skepticism or dissent. But our skepticism toward climate-change doomsayers is not a reflection of conservative ignorance — quite the opposite. There is a well-established pattern, dating back to the 19th century (if not earlier) of erroneous “consensus” among self-appointed scientific “experts,” and it is our knowledge of this pattern — repeat, knowledge, not ignorance — that leads us  to be skeptical of global-warming Chicken Little prophecies.

The sky is (probably) not falling. Earth’s atmosphere is (probably) large enough to absorb anthropogenic CO2 emissions without catastrophic damage. The result of global warming will (probably) not resemble any of the doomsayers’ predictions, and it is entirely possible that the global warming trend is not actually anthropogenic, but is instead mostly the result of normal variation in Earth’s temperatures. Inaccuracy in measurement, misguided computer modeling, flawed theories and other methodological errors (probably) explain most or all of the “science” that claims we are hurtling toward an impending man-made climate disaster.

Conservatives skeptical of climate-change doomsaying should not let themselves be bullied by arrogant “experts,” nor by the naive “intellectual” apostles of this Chicken Little cult.

 

‘Unintentionally Heteronormative’!

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Readers will please pardon my long silence this evening, but I was doing deep research on (yet another) long post about feminism, the completion of which will have to wait because . . . this:

Emily Nagoski is a Ph.D. “college health educator in Massachusetts.” Both an atheist and a progressive, Nagoski has “worked for well over a decade in the field of sexuality education and has grown into an impassioned advocate for social justice through sexual fulfillment.”

All of which is to say, no one could accuse Professor Nagoski of being a homophobic right-wing Christofascist. (Like us.)

So, in the fall semester of 2010, Professor Nagoski was eight weeks into teaching an entry-level course in Women’s Sexuality when she gave her lecture on the subject of “gender”:

After it, I received an email that, among a great deal else, described my curriculum — the entire curriculum, mark you — as “unintentionally heteronormative.”
Which made me stare, with one eyelid twitching, at my computer, because it means that for the last 8 weeks I have been failing, for two hours each week, over and over again, to make the most fundamental point of the class.
Because my class is neither unintentional nor heteronormative.

What’s the problem? In a word, science:

I’m, like, SO active in not assuming that anyone has any particular sexual orientation or gender identity and in teaching students not to make assumptions, to think critically about the science and the politics that live in the science. And of course I have an entire lecture on gender variation and another entire lecture on sexual orientation and identity (that’s next week).
But I AM teaching that humans are a sexually reproducing species wherein some have sperm (males) and some have eggs (females).

(Oops. Is it still legal to say that in Massachusetts?)

I suppose I’ve been relying on students to find their own way to embracing biology as a valuable way to think about sex. But this point of view is so foreign to many of them, many of them Sociology or Women’s Studies majors who have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction, many politically active around these issues without ever having studied them academically. And I suppose it was too much to ask that they get there on their own.
I wanted them to find their way to the notion that it’s not “heteronormative” to recognize that sex is an evolutionarily adaptive reproduction strategy that, in humans, involves males and females; it’s just our biology, and there’s a complex, mutually interacting relationship between the biological and the social. I’ve been working toward that all semester. But they have not gotten there.

You see where the advocates of Progress and Equality have led us: The basic biology of sex is now politically incorrect, so that even an avowed progressive cannot escape condemnation for the unforgivable Thought Crime of preferring facts to theory.

Professor Nagoski might want to invite me up as a Women’s Sexuality guest lecturer. My daughters have been instructed in the subjects of “Boys Have Cooties” and “Keep Your Britches On,” which I would argue are the most valuable lessons of all.

“Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
— Matthew 19:4-6 (KJV)

 

Carts and Horses, Causes and Effects

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Complex causation in human behavior means that social science often isn’t very scientific. Not every variable can be measured with such accuracy as, for example, annual income and years of education, and things which are not measured tend to be neglected as factors in social science. Researchers don’t usually find correlations by accident, and they never find correlations except in measurable data, so that a certain level of inaccuracy and error is inevitable.

All of this is necessary preamble to an Atlantic Monthly article by Matthew O’Brien with this provocative headline:

Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?

Uh, it’s not. The research O’Brien cites refers to the chance that someone whose parents are in the bottom 20% of the income distribution can rise to the top 20% of the distribution.

Stipulating that the data in the study is complete and accurate, and that everything in the analysis is legit — well, why is there a bright spot on the resulting map in the vicinity of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but no corresponding bright spot near Athens, Georgia? Why does rural Arkansas look like a beacon of upward mobility, while the bustling economies of Atlanta and Charlotte produce no such effect?

Most of all, why does the map referenced by O’Brien show that impoverished Appalachia offers more opportunity for advancement than any of the more prosperous surrounding flatlands?

To use a social science term: Your data is obviously fucked up.

Look, O’Brien: I don’t want to start a fight, but if somebody tells you West Virginia is a glory land of economic opportunity, this is obviously somebody who never set foot in West Virginia. I don’t give a damn what they tell you after that, their credibility is shot.

With the strange mixture of credulous certainty and interventionist enthusiasm that behooves a writer for the Atlantic, however, O’Brien proceeds to draw conclusions from this research:

The researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower the upward mobility. But this isn’t actually a black-white issue. It’s a rich-poor one. Low-income whites who live in areas with more black people also have a harder time moving up the income ladder. In other words, it’s something about the places that black people live that hurts mobility.

Ri-iiiight.

Something like the poor being isolated — isolated from good jobs and good schools. See, the more black people a place has, the more divided it tends to be along racial and economic lines. The more divided it is, the more sprawl there is. And the more sprawl there is, the less higher-income people are willing to invest in things like public transit.
That leaves the poor in the ghetto, with no way out for their American Dreams. They’re stuck with bad schools, bad jobs, and bad commutes if they do manage to find better work. So it should be no surprise that the researchers found that racial segregation, income segregation, and sprawl are all strongly negatively correlated with upward mobility

So, if this is about “sprawl” that “leaves the poor in the ghetto,” why a vast expanse of low mobility in the rural South,  where there are no ghettos (because there are no major cities) and where there is no suburban “sprawl” (because there are no suburbs)?

Do you see what I mean about “credulous certainty”? If you begin with the assumption that the researchers have accurately measured something meaningful — West Virginia, land of opportunity! — and then start blabbering that “the researchers found” this, that and the other correlation, you’re likely to end up making all kinds of foolish arguments, as Matthew O’Brien eagerly does:

 The American Dream is alive in Denmark and Finland and Sweden. And in San Jose and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh. But it’s dead in Atlanta and Raleigh and Charlotte. And in Indianapolis and Detroit and Jacksonville. Fixing that isn’t just about redistribution. It’s about building denser cities, so the poor aren’t so segregated. About good schools that you don’t have to live in the right (and expensive) neighborhood to attend. And about ending a destructive drug war that imprisons and blights the job prospects of far too many non-violent offenders — further shrinking the pool of “marriageable” men.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

You have no clue, O’Brien. “Building denser cities” in rural South Georgia? “Ending a destructive drug war” in Eutaw, Alabama? The American Dream “alive” in Pittsburgh but “dead” in Charlotte? You’re attempting to “solve” a problem you haven’t even begun to understand, and in the process making yourself a public nuisance.

UPDATE: Thanks to Eric Mertz and other commenters who looked over the Harvard study and spotted obvious issues. Here is an excerpt that clearly points toward the basic problem:

We characterize intergenerational mobility using information from de-identi ed federal income tax records, which provide data on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents between 1996 and 2012. . . . In our baseline analysis, we focus on current U.S. citizens in the 1980-1982 birth cohorts { the oldest children in our data for whom we can reliably identify parents based on information on dependent claiming. We measure these children’s income as mean total family income in 2011 and 2012, when they are approximately 30 years old. We measure their parents’ income as mean family income between 1996 and 2000, when the children are between the ages of 15 and 20.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is insane. That is to say, what percentage of people reach the top 20% in income by age 30? Most people’s incomes peak in their 40s and 50s. Many 30-year-olds are just a few years out of college. Mertz promises a more complete analysis Monday at his blog, and we’ll wait to see what he finds. But my basic common-sense hunch — the alleged superior mobility of West Virginians — tells me something is wrong here.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!