A Stem Cell Potpourri

The stem cell debate is apparently done and over with on the Left Coast. California has “quietly” stopped referring to embryonic stem cells when it reports progress, and now refers to the more generic term “stem cells”. In this guise it is able to claim the progress from adult and induced pluripotent stem cells in its releases, even though the $ billions of taxpayers dollars it spent went straight into embryonics. The problem is that embryonic stem cells produced nothing. Zero, zip, nada.

From Investors.com:

“Bioethics: Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress. So supporters are embracing research they once opposed.

“California's Proposition 71 was intended to create a $3 billion West Coast counterpart to the National Institutes of Health, empowered to go where the NIH could not — either because of federal policy or funding restraints on biomedical research centered on human embryonic stem cells.

“Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were being held up only by President Bush's policy of not allowing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) beyond existing stem cell lines and which involved the destruction of embryos created for that purpose.

“Five years later, ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created to, as some have put it, restore science to its rightful place, is diverting funds from ESCR to research that has produced actual therapies and treatments: adult stem cell research. It not only has treated real people with real results; it also does not come with the moral baggage ESCR does.

“To us, this is a classic bait-and-switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research Prop. 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed. We have noted how over the years that when funding was needed, the phrase "embryonic stem cells" was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word "embryonic" was dropped because ESCR never got out of the lab.”

There have, indeed, been many advances in NON-embryonic stem cell research, many of which I have recorded on this blog. Here are some more, just for the record.

At Northwestern University, new cartilage has been grown in animal joints using an injectable gel that automatically forms a lattice substrate, upon which stem cells which are already present in the bone marrow induce growth of new collagen: cartilage tissue.

At Clemson U., an injectable gel has been used to reverse brain damage, by exciting the activity of stem cells already present.

“In a follow-up study, Dr. Zhang loaded the gel with immature stem cells, as well as the chemicals they needed to develop into full-fledged adult brain cells. When rats with severe brain injuries were treated with this mixture for eight weeks, they showed signs of significant recovery.

“The new gel could treat patients at varying stages following injury, and is expected to be ready for testing in humans in about three years.”

And at Kyoto University:

” Last November, two teams of scientists turned ordinary adult skin cells into pluripotent stem cells—capable of becoming any kind of tissue—a feat that could solve the ethical problem forever. Here’s how one group did it.

“The scientists, led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan, identified 24 genes that are active in embryonic stem cells but not in adult cells. They deposited combinations of the 24 genes into the DNA of adult mouse skin cells.

“They found that just four of the original 24 genes will turn adult cells into stem cells. The scientists aren’t quite sure what the genes do. They think two of the genes code for proteins that encourage further protein synthesis.

“The scientists repeated their experiment on human adult skin cells using the same four genes as in the mouse model. The human cells also turned into stem cells and then differentiated into brain and heart cells.”

PZ Watch 02.08.10

Today PZ said,

” He asked me if I admitted that the scientific position demands that we reject all alternative explanations — whether we can consider supernatural causes. I've thought about this before, and I told him no. I am willing to consider other possibilities, if someone provides a useful, testable, confirmable means for evaluating truth claims.”

PZ was irritated that the questioner, a hated Creationist, considered this answer to be a confirmation of his, PZ’s, rejection of supernatural existence. After all, PZ was willing to consider supernatural existence so long as the evidence is natural, of course.

This is a basic category error when (category A) = ! (category B), demanding that category B must be found within category A, and if it is not found in category A, then category B does not exist. The basic definition of supernatural is that it is not natural. It doesn’t seem to be all that difficult to comprehend that for this argument, A = !B. It’s simple. It’s a definition.

But this false stumbling block is placed out as a catch for the logically unwary, by those who probably know better (or surely should): university professors like PZ. Now if PZ doesn’t know better, then his ability at logical analysis is flawed at the most basic level. And if he does know better, then he is dishonest.

Perhaps this evaluation seems a bit harsh: either woefully deficient in the principles of logic and rational thought, or dishonest. I see no third road, no valid reason to make fallacious statements like this one.

Next Crisis Please

I haven’t posted much lately about either the implosion of the IPCC-AGW-climategate, or the implosion of the Obama driven healthcare “crisis” along with the depreciation of Obama himself. Both of these are fabricated crises, created with the transfer of wealth in mind. This made them fair game for quite a while. But now it’s like kicking a downed dog, it seems a little cruel to bludgeon them any further.

What is more interesting now is to watch for signs of the next manufactured crisis that will need massive government intervention. Perhaps it will be a continuation of the bailouts, or maybe a new war, possible with Iran or North Korea, both of which seem to be spoiling for a fight.

More likely the Lefties will find some humanitarian failure that only $$ can solve. It will be an “acute moral imperative” that we spend this cash into a new arena where only the highly ethical are investing. The Soros / Gore types will have their new organizations in place to cash in on the new, highly moral, government cash flow.

Will it be energy independence? Global hunger is always available. Maybe AIDs. Or possibly something new and entertaining, like the homeless crisis was.

Keep your eyes peeled and let me know if you detect a trend.

In his book, “The Vision of the Annointed”, Thomas Sowell chronicles the crises of the 20th century that were not actually crises at all, they were trumped up to appear as crises by the self-“anointed” elites. Sowell analyzes the thought process behind the crisis generation, and the stonewall of silence that accompanies the abject failure of each moral program. A recommended read.

And I recently posted about the Cloward-Piven philosophy, one that advocates stressing the governmental system beyond the breaking point, and utilizing the chaos of the collapse to generate a more socialist system.

I remember many of these costly and doomed forays of the elitist, socialist moralizing. Along with the aforementioned homeless crisis, there have been the war on hunger, the war on poverty, the war on the population explosion, the war on pollution, the war on environmental catastrophes of one type or another, the war on DDT, the war on the unborn, the war on marriage and the family, the war on endangered species, the war on oil companies, the war on insurance companies, the war on drug companies, the war on energy companies, the war on auto companies, the war on Wall Street, the war on capitalism and corporations in general, the war on nuclear energy, the war on BT or biologically modified crops, the war on farmers, the war on beef, the war on religion, the war on wars, the war on the constitution, the war on the Boy Scouts, the war on home schools, the war on the white male, the war on drugs, the war on the death penalty, the war on McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, the war on carbon, the war on absolutes, truth and morals… just to name a few. Some of these fizzled right away while others became institutionalized.

Somehow, under the “commerce clause” in the U.S.Constitution, the federal government has expanded to cover crises in education, labor, endangered species, hate crimes, even the amount of water per flush and the carbon emissions per engine cycle.

In almost every case, there is a declared moral imperative to resolve the perceived crisis by government intervention, usually in the form of regulations that require new bureaucratic organizations that never, ever disappear, even when the “crisis” itself is found bogus and disappears. This has resulted in a government that is parasitic on the private sector to the point of near collapse, an effect that seems to have an accelerating arrival time. But that will not stop the generation of an all-new crisis, one that has a declared acute moral imperative to be resolved by more government expenditures and more bureaucrats.

I’m just not sure what that crisis is, yet.

PZ Watch 02.04.10

Sometimes I even agree with PZ. Today his rant is against his own university for its hosting of a homeopathy seminar. PZ thinks the seminar should be banned, of course, and that’s not where we agree. I agree that homeopathy is not a useful approach to health care, beyond the placebo effect.

But PZ makes an interesting comment, buried in the middle of his rant (and it is a rant). PZ says,

“That's one of the fundamental principles of science, that you can't just get by on assertions — you have to be able to explain how you know something, and homeopaths can't.”

And of course, neither can Philosophical Materialists and Atheists.

Most of PZ’s “award winning science blog” has no science at all – today’s posts are Atheist and activist oriented, with the exception of a picture of a flower and his enraged attack on homeopathy, which has very little science in it. Tomorrow he will find and post a photo of a squid or octopus, and that will be it.

So most of PZ’s blog activities involve violations of his own science dictum: Atheist ‘ejaculations’, assertions with no explanation of how he knows that there is no deity… scientifically of course.

A Conversation Between Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg

Three great physicists met in Copenhagen 25 years after the Copenhagen Meeting of 1952 when quantum theory became endowed with the Copenhagen interpretation. Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg gathered to discuss the impact of their 1952 conference and of the universe in general. The following are the final paragraphs of the notes of Heisenberg about his conversation with Pauli during a long walk. [1]

“We walked on in silence and had soon reached the northern tip of the Langelinie, whence we continued along the jetty as far as the small beacon. In the north, we could still see a bright strip of red; in these latitudes the sun does not travel far beneath the horizon. The outlines of the harbor installations stood out sharply, and after we had been standing at the end of the jetty for a while, Wolfgang asked me quite unexpectedly:

“Do you believe in a personal God? I know, of course, how difficult it is to attach a clear meaning to this question, but you can probably appreciate its general purport.”

“May I rephrase your question?” I asked. “I myself should prefer the following formulation: can you, or anyone else, reach the central order of things or events, whose existence seems beyond doubt, as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being? I am using the term ‘soul’ quite deliberately so as not to be misunderstood. If you put your question like that, I would say yes. And because my own experiences do not matter so much, I might go on to remind you of Pascal’s famous text, the one he kept sewn in his jacket. It was headed “Fire” and began with the words: “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – not of the philosophers and sages.”

“In other words, you think that you can become aware of the central order with the same intensity as of the soul of another person?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why did you use the word ‘soul’ and not simply speak of another person?”

“Precisely because the word, ‘soul’, refers to the central order, to the inner core of a being whose outer manifestations may be highly diverse and pass our understanding.

“If the magnetic force that has guided this particular compass – and what else was its source but the central order – should ever become extinguished, terrible things may happen to mankind, far more terrible even than concentration camps and atom bombs. But we did not set out to look into such dark recesses; let’s hope the central realm will light our way again, perhaps in quite unsuspected ways. As far as science is concerned, however, Niels is certainly right to underwrite the demands of pragmatists and positivists for meticulous attention to detail and for semantic clarity. It is only in respect to its taboos that we can object to positivism, for if we may no longer speak or even think about the wider connections, we are without a compass and hence in danger of losing our way.”

“Despite the late hour, a small boat made fast on the jetty and took us back to Kongens Nytorv, whence it was easy to reach Niels’ house.”

[1]The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics; Ferris, ed.; pp 826, 827.

Structure of an Incendiary Blog Post

[This post is taken from Coyote Crossing, go there to read the whole thing. And read the comments too, they're great.]

This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post
Posted by Chris Clarke on January 24, 2010

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.

This sentence implies that everyone reading has certainly seen the folly of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence reminds the reader that there are a few others who agree. This sentence contains one-word links to other blogs with whom the author seeks to curry favor, offered as examples of those others.

This sentence returns to the people who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence makes an improbably tenuous connection between those people and a current or former major political figure. This sentence links those people and that political figure to a broad, ill-defined sociodemographic class sharing allegedly similar belief systems. This sentence contains a reference to the teachings of Jesus; its intent may be either ironic or sincere.

[The rest is at Coyote Crossing... give him some traffic.]

Analysis vs Debate

Much of what happens on a blog is in the form of a debate. The blogger asserts a premise/conclusion and the commenters take sides. The result seems like a debate, but is uncontrolled and is frequently unmanageable, deteriorating into opinionated jabbing and posturing. True debating has rules, is somewhat managed, and even then frequently becomes opinionated jabbing and posturing.

The context of a debate is not at all analytical. Analysis is the objective, dispassionate probing of axioms, premises, evidence and the logic leading to conclusions. Debate is the scoring of points in order to win a competition; the points need not be based on rationality and can be gained by forcing the opposition into a corner or an infinite loop or some tactic to make him appear foolish, unsure, lost or some other characteristic of a losing arguer. This is very easily done with simple argumentation devices such as outright denial of definitional issues, pursuit of fallacies as valid logic, attacking valid logic as fallacious, persistently veering off topic, attacking the opposition as a person or attacking his credentials, etc. It is easier to jam up a debate than it is to produce a legitimate rejoinder.

Formal debates start with a premise and conclusion, by a side that starts with the burden of proof. The burden of proof requires that the axioms, premises, evidence be sound, and the conclusion follows logically from them.

The opposition has the burden of rejoinder, which is the requirement that the opposition assert any non-valid axioms, premises, and evidence, with valid axioms, premises and evidence found in the original proposition; or assert the logical fallacy behind the reasoning of the original assertion. And then the opposition has the burden of proof for the presentation of the opposing proposition, including assertion of valid axioms, premises, and evidence, along with a logically valid conclusion.

Then the original side becomes the opposition, with the burden of rejoinder, as shown above.

Formal debates even have rules, such as that non-monotonic or binary reasoning is or is not acceptable, or that certain thresholds of probability equate to non-acceptable or acceptable ( e.g.: <00.0001% is not an acceptable probability for accepting a premise, >99.999% probability is acceptable; in between is subject to further scrutiny).

What really happens in the blogosphere is rarely like the formal process. The drive to win is frequently fed by an attachment to an agenda that is not the desire to reveal truth. When an agenda is threatened, the proponent starts to use tactics rather than logic, and to insist that these tactics are not fallacies, they are in fact logic. And it is difficult-to-impossible to ascertain the opposition’s true set of presuppositions, and the opposition might even deny that they have them.

The result is a chaotic mess that profits neither side, much less the observers.

It is understandable that a proponent of an idea that is essential to his worldview would become stressed to the point of constant fallacious assertions in order to protect that worldview. After all, to lose such an argument threatens his entire view of the world and of himself. And debating is win/lose argumentation.

This is the reason that I sometimes cease an argument. When an argument becomes non-rational, in the sense that the niceties of formal arguments are rejected in favor of win/lose tactics, there is no cause to continue because there is no chance of arriving at a rational, valid conclusion in that atmosphere.

I have dedicated this blog to analysis, and I welcome those who question any of these analyses and wish to arrive at valid conclusions. These comments are valuable and highly desirable.

But when a win/lose argument is found unable to be redirected into an analytical channel, I will assert my right to stop it, and move on. This is not about win/lose, it is about discovering the extent of reality and the possible existence of validity and truth despite a culture that denies it.

And I do encourage everyone to engage with me in this analytic pursuit.

The IPCC's Really, Really Bad Week

In a second revelation of IPCC misconduct, the connection made between global warming and bad weather related costs has been found to be not merely taken from non-peer-reviewed literature, but to be false. According to the Times On-Line,

"The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s".

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

Roger Pielke Jr. has been protesting this since 2006. Apparently the IPCC has no taste for dissent, especially dissent that threatens their chosen narrative. According to Pielke,

"So to summarize: Contrary to its procedures the IPCC chose to emphasize a paper that was not peer reviewed to support claims that were contrary to all of the peer reviewed literature on this topic. The IPCC created (or had others create) a graph that appeared nowhere in the literature and was highly misleading. When the paper was eventually published several years later as a book chapter, it was revised in such a substantial fashion so as to eliminate unambiguously any basis for the claims that had been made by the IPCC justified by the earlier version of the paper.

The claims made by the IPCC about the relationship of disasters and climate change, expressed most clearly in the figure above, were not simply made in violation of IPCC procedures. The claims were not just wrong. The claims were based on knowledge that just doesn't exist. Again, not good."

Within one week, two of the foundational claims made by the IPCC to support their AGW activism have been shown not only to be outside the auspices of respectable science, but to be patently false. Plus there are now calls for the resignation of IPCC head, Raj Pachauri, who is now considered an embarrassment by his own government, in India. Not a good week, IPCC-wise.