Two different things

via Steven Hayward

"This has been ruled to be in complete defiance of Science."

More exquisite satire from the Babylon Bee:

TALLAHASSEE, FL—While many governors followed Science and shut down their states early and still have stay-at-home orders in place, Florida kept its beaches open through Spring Break and has already begun its reopening plans. Science says Florida should have seen skyrocketing deaths from COVID-19, but instead Florida -- despite its large elderly population -- has not seen anywhere near the number of problems faced by states like New York and New Jersey. This has been ruled to be in complete defiance of Science.

“We had good Science telling us Florida should have seen massive deaths,” said far right-wing conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. “And now Florida is undermining our trust in Science by not dying. We cannot tolerate this. More Floridians need to die. To die for Science.”

California Governor and Science believer Gavin Newsom agreed. “Ron DeSantis is a witch! Burn him!” Newsom said about the Florida governor. Experts widely believe DeSantis used something anti-Science -- like black magic -- to violate what Science said should be true.

There is now a movement by Science-believing Democrats to actively try to infect Floridians to try to get their death count to match projections. Democrats have also called for DeSantis to be put in some sort of Science prison -- a cage made using force fields or lasers or other Science things -- though it is unknown if that would be able to imprison him, considering his Floridian black magic.

"Scientists can and do get it wrong."

In The Pipeline, Kurt Schlicter writes in part,

The Chinese coronavirus has opened our eyes. “Denying science” is not the denial of the concept of science, but the denial of science as revealed truth and political blunt instrument. Science is a method, not a sacrament, and we’ve seen that scientists are subject to human foibles like fear, corruption and incompetence. They can and do get it wrong. So, when it comes to the climate in the year 2120, well, we’ll roll the dice.

Read more here.

"Totalitarianism always shifts the discussion to science when disconcerting conversations are unavoidable. [See the Fabians]"

Sundance writes in part in the Conservative Treehouse,

Red states -vs- Blue states. Urban -vs- Rural. Tribalism making the rules for those within specific geographic boundaries. That part of post COVID-19 panic is inherently predictable.

However, the disparity will need to be reconciled; and for that solution the Administrative State will likely demand the application of science as a solution. We can already hear these arguments within the discussions. Totalitarianism always shifts the discussion to science when disconcerting conversations are unavoidable. [See the Fabians]

The solution will be a COVID-19 vaccine; and to re-enter a full society everyone will be expected to get vaccinated to secure all other members of society. However, given the pesky issues with liberty, a mandated vaccine protocol will probably not pass muster.

Therefore those who wish to have unrestricted access to the entire country will be those who accept the vaccine. Those who do not accept the vaccine will have less choices.

Again, the solution returns to this outlook.

If you accept the vaccine, the state will register your compliance. Or not; it will be your choice. However, your access to society will also be based on your decision.

That’s what is coming at the end of this…

Read more here.

Climate change, science, and the lack thereof!

Bookworm has an informative post about climate change and science here.

"Now he tells us!"

Bookworm links today toan interview with James Lovelock in the Guardian. Bookworm informs us tha Lovelock

is one of the most influential voices in the global warming movement. He was present at the birth of the movement in the 60’s. Through 2009, he vociferously warned of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming.

In the Guardian interview,

What has changed dramatically . . . is his position on climate change. He now says: “Anyone who tries to predict more than five to 10 years is a bit of an idiot, because so many things can change unexpectedly.” But isn’t that exactly what he did last time we met? “I know,” he grins teasingly. “But I’ve grown up a bit since then.”

Lovelock now believes that “CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would. The computer models just weren’t reliable. In fact,” he goes on breezily, “I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change. You’ve only got to look at Singapore. It’s two-and-a-half times higher than the worst-case scenario for climate change, and it’s one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in.” . .

Lovelock maintains that, unlike most environmentalists, he is a rigorous empiricist, but it is manifestly clear that he enjoys maddening the green movement. “Well, it’s a religion, really, you see. It’s totally unscientific. . . .

"Something, we know not what."

At the American Thinker Matt Patterson asks, "What lies beneathe?"

New scientific discoveries in astrophysics and archeology make the notion of “settled science” risible. They also bring to mind the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld in stressing the vital importance of “unknown unknowns.”

Perhaps the Western penetration of nature has been superficial at best. In fact, the foremost thinkers on the very edges of science are staring into an abyss of knowledge -- literally.

Dark matter and dark energy combined make up 95 percent of everything. And yet we have no idea what these things are, how they work, or what they mean for the fate of the universe.

Put it this way: all of the stars and star-spawned material that is visible in the universe -- including every planet, person or proton -- accounts for a mere 5 percent of existence. It reflects radiation or emits it. It shines gloriously in the night sky, begging for our gaze and our awe. The rest? We know it’s there, but we cannot see it.

It is literally dark.

Dark matter is composed of some thing other than the electrons and protons that make up our 5 percent world. Whatever it is, we can be thankful for it -- it seems to be the only thing holding galaxies together (there is not enough ordinary matter present in observable galaxies to prevent them from disintegrating).

Dark energy is a mysterious force borne by some thing other than the photons that carry energy in our 5 percent world. We know it exists because we observe its effect on our luminous matter -- the universe is flying apart. Gravity should be slowing the universe down and contracting its constituent parts; instead, things are flying apart at an increasing rate.

Scientists are hard at work of course, trying to detect and understand these phenomena. And they may one day succeed. But their failure to understand the depth of their ignorance until very recently speaks to a problem with the scientific method itself.

The long climb to scientific supremacy begun by Aristotle in his invention of symbolic logic has in the end taken us to the summit of what turns out to be a very small hill, as we crane our necks upward at a looming, unseeable, unending mountain range.

...If the dark nature of our universe is only now being acknowledged and probed by the scientific community, it will be many years yet before the realization seeps into the worlds of art and philosophy. But when it does, the minds and creations of our dreamers and thinkers will reverberate with a profound sense of insecurity that may shake the very foundations of modern existence.

How is it possible, they will ask, that so much of reality remains closed to us even after two thousand years of following the Theseus-like string left by our great scientists? It’s as if we emerge from the labyrinth, having followed the string -- not into the bright light of day -- but into a deeper and blacker chamber.

It is, ironically, parallel to what is happening in the realm of archaeology. The textbooks of our high schools and universities lay out facts about our past as if they are clean and neat ornaments to be passed around and cooed over. The reality is that the more we dig, the more it becomes obvious that what we thought we knew about our ancestors is at best incomplete, and at worst dangerously wrong.

For example: the standard model of the rise of civilization draws a very straight and neat line from the Neolithic revolution, which led to the invention of cities, the written word, etc., right up to the iPhone that’s burning a hole in your pocket.

Unfortunately, it isn't so simple.

Recent excavations at a site in southeast Turkey show an astonishing megalithic monument, covered with complex and beautiful symbols. It is called Göbekli Tepe.

...We have no idea how large it really is, who built it, what they used it for, or why. We know it was in use for thousands of years. And it was apparently, intentionally buried around 8,000 B.C. The deliberate burial of such a complex, requiring the movement of hundreds of tons of earth is in itself as stunning an engineering achievement as the construction of the monument itself.

Keep in mind this site is not some fevered imagining of some History Channel fake expert or alien conspiracy theorist. This is an actual archaeological site being excavated and puzzled over by credentialed and thoroughly disturbed scientists.

And in fact, excavators estimate that what they have found constitutes a mere 5 percent of the complex, and that digging for another century will still not reveal the whole of the structure.

It’s all so disturbing to scientists because they thought they knew the human story already. And they make their living telling that story, their entire lives are based upon the fact that they are experts in that story. How profoundly unsettling it must be to realize perhaps you understand the smallest sliver of a story that was more vast and complicated than you could have ever imagined.

And so it is with physicists confronting dark matter and energy.

In the end, Western scientists may be forced, when asked to explain what the vast majority of existence rests upon, to answer:

“Something, we know not what.”

Read more here.

He tells about

How is science being taught in your kids' schools?

Are your kids struggling to learn science in the public schools? Maybe part of the blame belongs to the way science is taught. Seth Godin has some ideas about that:

How to teach science

Start with the method. Unlike just about everything else we teach, science is not based on human culture or history. If one wants to study literature or geography or the Kings and Queens of England, it begins with knowing all that came before, the work, the names, the lists, the battles. Science, on the other hand, is above culture. Gravity would have existed even if Isaac Newton hadn't invented it. After two weeks of science class, students should know how to think like a scientist.
Science makes sense, it's not magic. One of the challenges of teaching science in high school is that there seems to be so much to cover, it's tempting to cram all the formulas, names and theories in front of students. Just as there's no room to argue about when they fought the War of 1812, we often present science as a bag of magical facts, not the result of a method, a method students can implement.
Then the vocabulary. Not first, not second, but third. Vocabulary is where science students tune out. When a word doesn't mean anything, when it's a random placeholder, the easiest thing to do is fail to understand it, forever. And then there's no recovery. A strong vocabulary gives students the foundation to move forward, a weak one is the end, forever.
Metaphors are how we understand. Most of science, even physics after a few months, is about the invisible, the tiny, the very large, the things under the skin. The more we give students metaphors to hook these concepts into a world that's understood, the better.

Here are some statements worth avoiding:

Memorize this, it will be on the test.

Don't worry about it, just be able to answer the question.

You understood the concept, but were wrong by a decimal point. Zero credit.

Do the lab, even if it doesn't make sense.

In my (limited) experience, just about everything we do to teach science is diametrically the opposite of the points listed above.

If it's worth memorizing, it's worth even more to understand it.

PS this works with anything scientific, not just school science.

Someone is in charge!

Thomas P. Sheahen writes at American Thinker,

...scientists stand open-jawed and in awesome wonder, consider all that lies before us, both known and unknown. On the one hand, we are very impressed with the vastness of the universe; but on the other, we are even more impressed that it all makes sense, that the entire story hangs together. There is a unity that pervades all of science, and that unity points very clearly to the realization that Someone is in charge.

...It is the small size of the mind, not the large size of the numbers, that leads to the mistake of thinking God can’t handle the job.

...As editor Francis Church wrote in 1897, “Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.” That point has gradually sunk in with scientists. By accepting with humility that we don’t know it all, and that our scientific instruments only investigate a small slice of the universe, we realize that reality extends far beyond the boundaries of science. “Love and generosity and devotion exist, and we know that they give to life its highest beauty and joy.”

Read more here.

Food fight

For decades, the government has advised Americans on what they should eat. The advice isn’t just advisory; it drives everything from school lunches and agricultural subsidies to marketing for those bowls of candy we call breakfast cereal. But the science behind this enterprise has always been shaky.

...If you’ve been paying any attention, you’ve seen the stories about how fat isn’t necessarily bad for you, while carbs are the real enemy. Studies have found that more milk fat in your diet correlates with less heart disease. Who’s right? I lost nearly 50 pounds in part by cutting out carbs. That’s clear enough for me, but it’s also clear there’s a lot we don’t yet understand.

...There’s no shortage of lessons here, well beyond this food fight. Even when everyone’s intentions are good, politics can get in the way of science. Scientists are not immune to fads and groupthink just because they claim to speak for science. Special interests work the refs, but the refs often have an agenda as well. Winners of policy fights hate to lose — or admit they’re wrong. And people who shout about a settled consensus are often only shouting to drown out those who might disagree.

Read more here.

Psychology? Science?

Maverick researchers have long argued that much of what gets published in elite scientific journals is fundamentally squishy — that the results tell a great story but can’t be reproduced when the experiments are run a second time.

Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. Over the course of four years, 270 researchers attempted to reproduce the results of 100 experiments that had been published in three prestigious psychology journals.

It was awfully hard. They ultimately concluded that they’d succeeded just 39 times.

Read more here.

The latest science on cholesterol in your diet

(Photo by Deb Lindsey/For The Washington Post)
Your genes, and how much saturated fat you eat: that's what causes the cholesterol content in your blood. Not how much food you eat that is high in cholesterol. Read more here.

The issue is settled

Daniel Greenfield writes:

The easy way to tell real religion from fake religion is that real religion doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t assure you that everything you’re doing is right and that you ought to keep on doing it.

The same holds true for science. Real science doesn’t make you feel smart. Fake science does.

Real science tells us that we are basically stupid. A close study of history proves it. And that’s a good thing. Stupid people can learn from their mistakes. Self-assured elites convinced of their own superior intelligence can’t. Everyone makes mistakes. The future belongs to those who recognize them.

Intelligence as ideology is at the heart of the left. Its Orwellian twist discards the need for using intelligence to question its ideology by asserting that the issue is settled. To be smart is to be left and to be left is to be smart. And only stupid people would question that.

There is no need to think about anything because the smart people have already done all the thinking. You can show you are smart by accepting their conclusions or show your stupidity by questioning them.

Science and skepticism are the tools of stupid people. As Socrates put it, I know that I know nothing. We have the most to fear from the smart people who don’t know and will never admit how little they know.

"My Mom packed a Bible"

h/t Scott Ott

Understanding the world

Digitally generated image showing volcanic eruptions during formation of Earth Dorling Kindersley—Getty Images/Vetta

Amir D. Aczel writes,

Why is our Universe so precisely tailor-made for the emergence of life? This question has never been answered satisfactorily, and I believe that it will never find a scientific solution. For the deeper we delve into the mysteries of physics and cosmology, the more the Universe appears to be intricate and incredibly complex. To explain the quantum-mechanical behavior of even one tiny particle requires pages and pages of extremely advanced mathematics. Why are even the tiniest particles of matter so unbelievably complicated? It appears that there is a vast, hidden “wisdom,” or structure, or a knotty blueprint for even the most simple-looking element of nature. And the situation becomes much more daunting as we expand our view to the entire cosmos.

We know that 13.7 billion years ago, a gargantuan burst of energy, whose nature and source are completely unknown to us and not in the least understood by science, initiated the creation of our Universe. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the “God particle”—the Higgs boson discovered two years ago inside CERN’s powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider—came into being and miraculously gave the Universe its mass. Why did this happen? The mass constituted elementary particles—the quarks and the electron—whose weights and electrical charges had to fall within immeasurably tight bounds for what would happen next. For from within the primeval “soup” of elementary particles that constituted the young Universe, again as if by a magic hand, all the quarks suddenly bunched in threes to form protons and neutrons, their electrical charges set precisely to the exacting level needed to attract and capture the electrons, which then began to circle nuclei made of the protons and neutrons. All of the masses, the charges, and the forces of interaction in the Universe had to be just in the precisely needed amounts so that early light atoms could form. Larger ones would then be cooked in nuclear fires inside stars, thus giving us the carbon, iron, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the other elements that are so essential for life to emerge. And eventually, the highly complicated double-helix molecule, the life-propagating DNA, would be formed.

Why did everything we need in order to exist come into being? How was all of this possible without some latent outside power to orchestrate the precise dance of elementary particles required for the creation of all the essentials of life? The great British mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated—based on only one of the hundreds of parameters of the physical Universe—that the probability of the emergence of a life-giving cosmos was one divided by 10, raised to the power 10, and again raised to the power of 123. This is a number as close to zero as anyone has ever imagined. (The probability is much, much smaller than that of winning the Mega Millions jackpot for more days than the Universe has been in existence.)

The “Scientific Atheists” have scrambled to explain this troubling mystery by suggesting the existence of a multiverse—an infinite set of universes, each with its own parameters. In some universes, the conditions are wrong for life; however, by the sheer size of this putative multiverse, there must be a universe where everything is right. But if it takes an immense power of nature to create one universe, then how much more powerful would that force have to be in order to create infinitely many universes? So the purely hypothetical multiverse does not solve the problem of God. The incredible fine-tuning of the Universe presents the most powerful argument for the existence of an immanent creative entity we may well call God. Lacking convincing scientific evidence to the contrary, such a power may be necessary to force all the parameters we need for our existence—cosmological, physical, chemical, biological, and cognitive—to be what they are.

Science and religion are two sides of the same deep human impulse to understand the world, to know our place in it, and to marvel at the wonder of life and the infinite cosmos we are surrounded by. Let’s keep them that way, and not let one of them attempt to usurp the role of the other.

Read more here.

Monster asteroid?

Here is a story about a massive asteroid striking the Earth 3 billion years ago and perhaps causing the continents to slide.

The effects on the planet were reportedly spectacular. The impact would have set off a planet-wide firestorm, evaporating the surface of the Earth's oceans and causing earthquakes over 10.8 on the Richter scale that lasted over half an hour, and triggered more seismic activity across the globe.

The impact would have wiped out many of the species in existence at the time, allowing others to take over – much as the loss of the dinosaurs helped mammals grow to become one of the dominant species on the planet. It could also be responsible for shifting the planet's tectonic plate system into a higher gear.

thanks to Instapundit for linking to the story.

Science abuse

Kate Paulk is a scientist. She writes that science is a way of thinking.

The first important thing is that science is never “settled”. Science is about observing facts, searching for patterns, making predictions from those patterns and then trying to disprove the predictions. If – to take an example – the pro-Global Warming faction was actually engaging in science, they would be searching for data that disproved their theories.

Oh, and a “theory” in science does not mean the same thing as a theory in general discourse. To be a scientific theory, it has to be mathematically rigorous and disprovable. Otherwise it’s a hypothesis (aka educated guess). Scientific laws describe behavior that is sufficiently well understood nobody expects to ever see it disproved – although since Einstein published the Theory of Relativity, it’s become clear that laws need to also specify the environment in which they apply, since Newton’s laws break down under conditions that you won’t find in normal life.

Of course, this is an idealized view, but it’s the ideal that all scientists should be aiming for. Government money – particularly large amounts of Government money – tends to shut down the desire to reach the ideals. So does corporate money, but corporate entities usually don’t have the amount of power a government wields. At the same time, this stuff is expensive, but without it you don’t have things like antibiotics, flushing toilets, internets and so on. It’s not particularly glamorous either, and usually doesn’t look at all like you see on TV. It’s more like Dirty Jobs visiting Mythbusters (the Mythbusters team does good, sound science, but they don’t show the hours of tedium that goes behind what they do screen).

Go here to read some of her examples of science abuse by politicians.

The scientific worldview

Jennifer Schuessler writes in the New York Times that theist philosopher Alvin Plantinga asserted to her that

Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image, “is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism,” with its random process of natural selection, he writes. “Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called ‘the scientific worldview.’ ”

Different, but complementary!

There is a fascinating post here on the differences in the male and female brains. Here is a graphic from the article.

Steve Conner writes at The Independent,

Researchers found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

This difference in the way the nerve connections in the brain are “hardwired” occurs during adolescence when many of the secondary sexual characteristics such as facial hair in men and breasts in women develop under the influence of sex hormones, the study found.

“These maps show us a stark difference - and complementarity - in the architecture of the human brain that helps to provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Ragini Verma, professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Conner writes,

The only part of the brain where right-left connectivity was greater in men than in women was in the cerebellum, an evolutionary ancient part of the brain that is linked with motor control.

Men tend to outperform women involving spatial tasks and motor skills - such as map reading - while women tend to better in memory tests, such as remembering words and faces, and social cognition tests, which try to measure empathy and “emotional intelligence”.

A separate study published last month found that the genes expressed in the human brain did so differently in men and women. Post-mortem tests on the brain and spinal cord of 100 individuals showed significant genetic differences between the sexes, which could account for the observed gender differences in neurological disorders, such as autism, according to scientists from University College London.

For instance, one theory of autism, which is affects about five times as many boys as girls, is that it is a manifestation of the “extreme male brain”, which is denoted by a failure to be able to show empathy towards others.

God and the New Atheism

There is an article over at Slate that I found interesting. The writer, Steve Paulson, is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best Of Our Knowledge." In the Slate article Paulson interviews John Haught, who is the author of a forthcoming book entitled God and the New Atheism.

Here are some Haught quotes from the interview.

From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things.

After Darwin, after Einstein -- just as after Galileo and Copernicus -- we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.

Darwin's thought seems to be more important intellectually and culturally than it's ever been. My view is that theology, instead of ignoring or closing its eyes to it, should look it squarely in the face. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. In my view, Darwin's thought is a gift to theology.

Why does the universe not stand still? there's a restlessness, a tendency of the cosmos to go beyond itself.

Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness -- all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community's belief that Jesus is still alive.

Read the whole thing here.