A Case For the IFLS Crowd (on Parade for AGW and Evolution)

Can it be called "science" if the results of the observation/experiment cannot or will not be reproduced... ever?

The case of the forensic crime lab in Massachusetts is a demonstration of the type of activity - called science - which was easily accepted as valid despite the obvious lack of validation of the "results". Such was claimed by a perpetrator of dry-labbed chemical reports which affected the entire Massachusetts Justice System, and which produced a hazard for all Massachusetts citizens.

The forensic science lab employed Annie Dookhan to test crime samples for chemical composition. Dookhan faked more than 20,000 sample reports, which invalidated all 20,000 convictions.

Epic Drug Lab Scandal Results in More Than 20,000 Convictions Dropped

Chemical tests can be replicated, but were not. Possible reasons for this might include cost, timing required, poor management, and of course, the Post Modern Concept that science is merely the opinion of an expert in the relevant area.

Given that Dookhan was not caught until after the 20,000 mark indicates that lesser frauds might well be occurring in lesser volume arenas, or even in single cases to affect a single conviction.

The answer is replication, whether affordable or not. Without replication, the validity of a single event experiment cannot be known to be valid.

Worse, non-measurable, non-deductivo-empirical pursuits cannot generate any reputable knowledge and are no more reliable than pure opinion. Empiricism was invented in order to rule out opinion, ideology, and false observation, leaving only reliable, repeatable actual knowledge of physical characteristics and events.

AGW and Evolution might be dear to the hearts of the IFLS protesters, but they are not empirical, they are subject to many internal frauds, and they are merely opinion which is now taken as ideological gospel by the empirically illiterate. Which describes the IFLS crowd.

Science Is Just Whatever Scientists Do...

Over 30,000 Published Studies Could Be Wrong Due to Contaminated Cells

This is very, very bad.

Researchers warn that large parts of biomedical science could be invalid due to a cascading history of flawed data in a systemic failure going back decades.

A new investigation reveals more than 30,000 published scientific studies could be compromised by their use of misidentified cell lines, owing to so-called immortal cells contaminating other research cultures in the lab.

The Science of Chimeras

Science is without any inherent morality. Even the medical injunction, "First, do no harm", does not apply. Big science, as all science is these days, requires a grounding in regulation, because it will not regulate itself, especially in an elitist culture which accepts no moral restrictions for itself. If the will to assert moral principles over DNA science does not exist, then the day of Dr. Mengele-science and Dr. Moreau-science, will rapidly emerge to become commonplace, and it will be defended by chimeric super-soldiers.

In Search For Cures, Scientists Create Embryos That Are Both Animal And Human

After the embryos have had their DNA edited this way, Ross creates another hole in the membrane so he can inject human induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS for short, into the pig embryos.

Like human embryonic stem cells, iPS cells can turn into any kind of cell or tissue in the body. The researchers' hope is that the human stem cells will take advantage of the void in the embryo to start forming a human pancreas.

Because iPS cells can be made from any adult's skin cells, any organs they form would match the patient who needs the transplant, vastly reducing the risk that the body would reject the new organ.

But for the embryo to develop and produce an organ, Ross has to put the chimera embryos into the wombs of adult pigs. That involves a surgical procedure, which is performed in a large operating room across the street from Ross's lab.
Pablo Ross of the University of California, Davis inserts human stem cells into a pig embryo as part of experiments to create chimeric embryos.

Pablo Ross of the University of California, Davis inserts human stem cells into a pig embryo as part of experiments to create chimeric embryos.
Rob Stein/NPR

The day Ross opened his lab to me, a surgical team was anesthetizing an adult female pig so surgeons could make an incision to get access to its uterus.

Ross then rushed over with a special syringe filled with chimera embryos. He injected 25 embryos into each side of the animal's uterus. The procedure took about an hour. He repeated the process on a second pig.

Every time Ross does this, he then waits a few weeks to allow the embryos to develop to their 28th day — a time when primitive structures such as organs start to form.

Ross then retrieves the chimeric embryos to dissect them so he can see what the human stem cells are doing inside. He examines whether the human stem cells have started to form a pancreas, and whether they have begun making any other types of tissues.

The uncertainty is part of what makes the work so controversial. Ross and other scientists conducting these experiments can't know exactly where the human stem cells will go. Ross hopes they'll only grow a human pancreas. But they could go elsewhere, such as to the brain.

"If you have pigs with partly human brains you would have animals that might actually have consciousness like a human," Newman says. "It might have human-type needs. We don't really know."

That possibility raises new questions about the morality of using the animals for experimentation. Another concern is that the stem cells could form human sperm and human eggs in the chimeras.

"If a male chimeric pig mated with a female chimeric pig, the result could be a human fetus developing in the uterus of that female chimera," Newman says. Another possibility is the animals could give birth to some kind of part-human, part-pig creature.

"One of the concerns that a lot of people have is that there's something sacrosanct about what it means to be human expressed in our DNA," says Jason Robert, a bioethicist at Arizona State University. "And that by inserting that into other animals and giving those other animals potentially some of the capacities of humans that this could be a kind of violation — a kind of, maybe, even a playing God."

Ross defends what his work. "I don't consider that we're playing God or even close to that," Ross says. "We're just trying to use the technologies that we have developed to improve peoples' life."

More "Pseudoscience" Involving Activists

Glyphosate, the MMR vaccine and pseudoscience

A large dossier claiming to find evidence that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic” was published last year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organisation. What could be more scientifically respectable?

Yet the document depends heavily on the work of an activist employed by a pressure group called the Environmental Defense Fund: Christopher Portier, whose conflict of interest the IARC twice omitted to disclose. Portier chaired the committee that proposed a study on glyphosate and then served as technical adviser to the IARC’s glyphosate report team, even though he is not a toxicologist. He has since been campaigning against glyphosate.

The IARC study is surely pseudoscience. It relies on a tiny number of cherry-picked studies, and even these don’t support its conclusion. The evidence that it causes cancer in humans is especially tenuous, based on three epidemiological studies with confounding factors and small sample sizes “linking” it to Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). The study ignored the US Agricultural Health Study, which has been tracking some 89,000 farmers and their spouses for 23 years.

The study found “no association between glyphosate exposure and all cancer incidence or most of the specific cancer subtypes we evaluated, including NHL . . .”

Many other studies found very little cancer risk from glyphosate use, but the IARC argued that they included some data generated by industry. Well, of course they did, because we rightly demand that industry, not the taxpayer, pays for and does the safety testing of its products and makes the results public. The IARC appeared to ignore work by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, managing the glyphosate dossier for the European Commission, which judged glyphosate safe. As did the European Food Safety Authority, whose head accused the IARC and Portier of bringing in the “Facebook age of science”.

[...]

James Gurney, a microbiologist who blogs on a site called the League of Nerds, describes the level of scholarship in the IARC report as “on a par with Andrew Wakefield of MMR/autism fame”.

In the case of Mr Wakefield’s claim that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism, the push-back against pseudoscience largely succeeded in this country, though not before real harm had been done. Journalists found that Mr Wakefield had failed to declare financing from lawyers preparing to sue vaccine makers and had taken blood samples at his own children’s party; further research failed to replicate his results. His paper was retracted and he was struck off the medical register, the General Medical Council calling him dishonest and irresponsible. His message is now falling on fertile ground in the United States, however, where measles epidemics have resumed as a result.

In both these cases, superficial plausibility is lent to the scares by history. Earlier pesticides were more dangerous: copper sulphate (still used as a fungicide by “organic” farmers) is toxic; DDT insecticide did wipe out predatory birds; paraquat herbicide was used in suicides. But Roundup is far, far less dangerous than these.

Likewise, early vaccines did carry risks. In the 1950s polio vaccines, grown in monkey tissue, were contaminated with SV40, a virus associated with cancer in monkeys. Many children were infected with the virus as a result. Fortunately, SV40 proved neither infectious nor carcinogenic in human beings, but it was a bullet dodged. Today such contamination is impossible.

Pseudoscience is bad enough when it infects astrologers, 9/11 truthers and crop-circle makers. But when its symptoms show up in mainstream bodies, such as the World Health Organisation, it’s time to be worried.

Science is vulnerable to infection from activists, greedy manipulators, and gullible Scientism. Giving too much credence to the contingent factoids produced by scientists who are under pressure to support politically correct data makes science into a dark art, when it should be a pristine intellectual pursuit.

Science and Reality

Scientific Regress
The problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t.
by William A. Wilson
May 2016

Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s results, and the most shocking. In many cases, they had used original experimental materials, and sometimes even performed the experiments under the guidance of the original researchers. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.

Their findings made the news, and quickly became a club with which to bash the social sciences. But the problem isn’t just with psychology. There’s an ­unspoken rule in the pharmaceutical industry that half of all academic biomedical research will ultimately prove false, and in 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to test it. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate. These were not studies published in fly-by-night oncology journals, but blockbuster research featured in Science, Nature, Cell, and the like. The Bayer researchers were drowning in bad studies, and it was to this, in part, that they attributed the mysteriously declining yields of drug pipelines. Perhaps so many of these new drugs fail to have an effect because the basic research on which their development was based isn’t valid.

When a study fails to replicate, there are two possible interpretations. The first is that, unbeknownst to the investigators, there was a real difference in experimental setup between the original investigation and the failed replication. These are colloquially referred to as “wallpaper effects,” the joke being that the experiment was affected by the color of the wallpaper in the room. This is the happiest possible explanation for failure to reproduce: It means that both experiments have revealed facts about the universe, and we now have the opportunity to learn what the difference was between them and to incorporate a new and subtler distinction into our theories.

The other interpretation is that the original finding was false. Unfortunately, an ingenious statistical argument shows that this second interpretation is far more likely. First articulated by John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, this argument proceeds by a simple application of Bayesian statistics. Suppose that there are a hundred and one stones in a certain field. One of them has a diamond inside it, and, luckily, you have a diamond-detecting device that advertises 99 percent accuracy. After an hour or so of moving the device around, examining each stone in turn, suddenly alarms flash and sirens wail while the device is pointed at a promising-looking stone. What is the probability that the stone contains a diamond?

Most would say that if the device advertises 99 percent accuracy, then there is a 99 percent chance that the device is correctly discerning a diamond, and a 1 percent chance that it has given a false positive reading. But consider: Of the one hundred and one stones in the field, only one is truly a diamond. Granted, our machine has a very high probability of correctly declaring it to be a diamond. But there are many more diamond-free stones, and while the machine only has a 1 percent chance of falsely declaring each of them to be a diamond, there are a hundred of them. So if we were to wave the detector over every stone in the field, it would, on average, sound twice—once for the real diamond, and once when a false reading was triggered by a stone. If we know only that the alarm has sounded, these two possibilities are roughly equally probable, giving us an approximately 50 percent chance that the stone really contains a diamond.

This is a simplified version of the argument that Ioannidis applies to the process of science itself. The stones in the field are the set of all possible testable hypotheses, the diamond is a hypothesized connection or effect that happens to be true, and the diamond-detecting device is the scientific method. A tremendous amount depends on the proportion of possible hypotheses which turn out to be true, and on the accuracy with which an experiment can discern truth from falsehood. Ioannidis shows that for a wide variety of scientific settings and fields, the values of these two parameters are not at all favorable.

For instance, consider a team of molecular biologists investigating whether a mutation in one of the countless thousands of human genes is linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The probability of a randomly selected mutation in a randomly selected gene having precisely that effect is quite low, so just as with the stones in the field, a positive finding is more likely than not to be spurious—unless the experiment is unbelievably successful at sorting the wheat from the chaff. Indeed, Ioannidis finds that in many cases, approaching even 50 percent true positives requires unimaginable accuracy. Hence the eye-catching title of his paper: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

What about accuracy? Here, too, the news is not good. First, it is a de facto standard in many fields to use one in twenty as an acceptable cutoff for the rate of false positives. To the naive ear, that may sound promising: Surely it means that just 5 percent of scientific studies report a false positive? But this is precisely the same mistake as thinking that a stone has a 99 percent chance of containing a ­diamond just because the detector has sounded. What it really means is that for each of the countless false hypo­theses that are contemplated by researchers, we accept a 5 percent chance that it will be falsely counted as true—a decision with a considerably more deleterious effect on the proportion of correct studies.

Paradoxically, the situation is actually made worse by the fact that a promising connection is often studied by several independent teams. To see why, suppose that three groups of researchers are studying a phenomenon, and when all the data are analyzed, one group announces that it has discovered a connection, but the other two find nothing of note. Assuming that all the tests involved have a high statistical power, the lone positive finding is almost certainly the spurious one. However, when it comes time to report these findings, what happens? The teams that found a negative result may not even bother to write up their non-discovery. After all, a report that a fanciful connection probably isn’t true is not the stuff of which scientific prizes, grant money, and tenure decisions are made.

And even if they did write it up, it probably wouldn’t be accepted for publication. Journals are in competition with one another for attention and “impact factor,” and are always more eager to report a new, exciting finding than a killjoy failure to find an association. In fact, both of these effects can be quantified. Since the majority of all investigated hypotheses are false, if positive and negative evidence were written up and accepted for publication in equal proportions, then the majority of articles in scientific journals should report no findings. When tallies are actually made, though, the precise opposite turns out to be true: Nearly every published scientific article reports the presence of an association. There must be massive bias at work.

Ioannidis’s argument would be potent even if all scientists were angels motivated by the best of intentions, but when the human element is considered, the picture becomes truly dismal. Scientists have long been aware of something euphemistically called the “experimenter effect”: the curious fact that when a phenomenon is investigated by a researcher who happens to believe in the phenomenon, it is far more likely to be detected. Much of the effect can likely be explained by researchers unconsciously giving hints or suggestions to their human or animal subjects, perhaps in something as subtle as body language or tone of voice. Even those with the best of intentions have been caught fudging measurements, or making small errors in rounding or in statistical analysis that happen to give a more favorable result. Very often, this is just the result of an honest statistical error that leads to a desirable outcome, and therefore it isn’t checked as deliberately as it might have been had it pointed in the opposite direction.

But, and there is no putting it nicely, deliberate fraud is far more widespread than the scientific establishment is generally willing to admit. One way we know that there’s a great deal of fraud occurring is that if you phrase your question the right way, ­scientists will confess to it. In a survey of two thousand research psychologists conducted in 2011, over half of those surveyed admitted outright to selectively reporting those experiments which gave the result they were after. Then the investigators asked respondents anonymously to estimate how many of their fellow scientists had engaged in fraudulent behavior, and promised them that the more accurate their guesses, the larger a contribution would be made to the charity of their choice. Through several rounds of anonymous guessing, refined using the number of scientists who would admit their own fraud and other indirect measurements, the investigators concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable.

Many forms of statistical falsification are devilishly difficult to catch, or close enough to a genuine judgment call to provide plausible deniability. Data analysis is very much an art, and one that affords even its most scrupulous practitioners a wide degree of latitude. Which of these two statistical tests, both applicable to this situation, should be used? Should a subpopulation of the research sample with some common criterion be picked out and reanalyzed as if it were the totality? Which of the hundreds of coincident factors measured should be controlled for, and how? The same freedom that empowers a statistician to pick a true signal out of the noise also enables a dishonest scientist to manufacture nearly any result he or she wishes. Cajoling statistical significance where in reality there is none, a practice commonly known as “p-hacking,” is particularly easy to accomplish and difficult to detect on a case-by-case basis. And since the vast majority of studies still do not report their raw data along with their findings, there is often nothing to re-analyze and check even if there were volunteers with the time and inclination to do so.

One creative attempt to estimate how widespread such dishonesty really is involves comparisons between fields of varying “hardness.” The author, Daniele Fanelli, theorized that the farther from physics one gets, the more freedom creeps into one’s experimental methodology, and the fewer constraints there are on a scientist’s conscious and unconscious biases. If all scientists were constantly attempting to influence the results of their analyses, but had more opportunities to do so the “softer” the science, then we might expect that the social sciences have more papers that confirm a sought-after hypothesis than do the physical sciences, with medicine and biology somewhere in the middle. This is exactly what the study discovered: A paper in psychology or psychiatry is about five times as likely to report a positive result as one in astrophysics. This is not necessarily evidence that psychologists are all consciously or unconsciously manipulating their data—it could also be evidence of massive publication bias—but either way, the result is disturbing.

Speaking of physics, how do things go with this hardest of all hard sciences? Better than elsewhere, it would appear, and it’s unsurprising that those who claim all is well in the world of science reach so reliably and so insistently for examples from physics, preferably of the most theoretical sort. Folk histories of physics combine borrowed mathematical luster and Whiggish triumphalism in a way that journalists seem powerless to resist. The outcomes of physics experiments and astronomical observations seem so matter-of-fact, so concretely and immediately connected to underlying reality, that they might let us gingerly sidestep all of these issues concerning motivated or sloppy analysis and interpretation. “E pur si muove,” Galileo is said to have remarked, and one can almost hear in his sigh the hopes of a hundred science journalists for whom it would be all too convenient if Nature were always willing to tell us whose theory is more correct.

And yet the flight to physics rather gives the game away, since measured any way you like—volume of papers, number of working researchers, total amount of funding—deductive, theory-building physics in the mold of Newton and Lagrange, Maxwell and Einstein, is a tiny fraction of modern science as a whole. In fact, it also makes up a tiny fraction of modern physics. Far more common is the delicate and subtle art of scouring inconceivably vast volumes of noise with advanced software and mathematical tools in search of the faintest signal of some hypothesized but never before observed phenomenon, whether an astrophysical event or the decay of a subatomic particle. This sort of work is difficult and beautiful in its own way, but it is not at all self-evident in the manner of a falling apple or an elliptical planetary orbit, and it is very sensitive to the same sorts of accidental contamination, deliberate fraud, and unconscious bias as the medical and social-scientific studies we have discussed. Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years—the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border—have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.

Many defenders of the scientific establishment will admit to this problem, then offer hymns to the self-correcting nature of the scientific method. Yes, the path is rocky, they say, but peer review, competition between researchers, and the comforting fact that there is an objective reality out there whose test every theory must withstand or fail, all conspire to mean that sloppiness, bad luck, and even fraud are exposed and swept away by the advances of the field.

So the dogma goes. But these claims are rarely treated like hypotheses to be tested. Partisans of the new scientism are fond of recounting the “Sokal hoax”—physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper heavy on jargon but full of false and meaningless statements to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text, which accepted and published it without quibble—but are unlikely to mention a similar experiment conducted on reviewers of the prestigious British Medical Journal. The experimenters deliberately modified a paper to include eight different major errors in study design, methodology, data analysis, and interpretation of results, and not a single one of the 221 reviewers who participated caught all of the errors. On average, they caught fewer than two—and, unbelievably, these results held up even in the subset of reviewers who had been specifically warned that they were participating in a study and that there might be something a little odd in the paper that they were reviewing. In all, only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the intentionally flawed paper be rejected.

If peer review is good at anything, it appears to be keeping unpopular ideas from being published. Consider the finding of another (yes, another) of these replicability studies, this time from a group of cancer researchers. In addition to reaching the now unsurprising conclusion that only a dismal 11 percent of the preclinical cancer research they examined could be validated after the fact, the authors identified another horrifying pattern: The “bad” papers that failed to replicate were, on average, cited far more often than the papers that did! As the authors put it, “some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis.”

What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons.

Older scientists contribute to the propagation of scientific fields in ways that go beyond educating and mentoring a new generation. In many fields, it’s common for an established and respected researcher to serve as “senior author” on a bright young star’s first few publications, lending his prestige and credibility to the result, and signaling to reviewers that he stands behind it. In the natural sciences and medicine, senior scientists are frequently the controllers of laboratory resources—which these days include not just scientific instruments, but dedicated staffs of grant proposal writers and regulatory compliance experts—without which a young scientist has no hope of accomplishing significant research. Older scientists control access to scientific prestige by serving on the editorial boards of major journals and on university tenure-review committees. Finally, the government bodies that award the vast majority of scientific funding are either staffed or advised by distinguished practitioners in the field.

All of which makes it rather more bothersome that older scientists are the most likely to be invested in the regnant research paradigm, whatever it is, even if it’s based on an old experiment that has never successfully been replicated. The quantum physicist Max Planck famously quipped: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Planck may have been too optimistic. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research studied what happens to scientific subfields when star researchers die suddenly and at the peak of their abilities, and finds that while there is considerable evidence that young researchers are reluctant to challenge scientific superstars, a sudden and unexpected death does not significantly improve the situation, particularly when “key collaborators of the star are in a position to channel resources (such as editorial goodwill or funding) to insiders.”

In the idealized Popperian view of scientific progress, new theories are proposed to explain new evidence that contradicts the predictions of old theories. The heretical philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, on the other hand, claimed that new theories frequently contradict the best available evidence—at least at first. Often, the old observations were inaccurate or irrelevant, and it was the invention of a new theory that stimulated experimentalists to go hunting for new observational techniques to test it. But the success of this “unofficial” process depends on a blithe disregard for evidence while the vulnerable young theory weathers an initial storm of skepticism. Yet if Feyerabend is correct, and an unpopular new theory can ignore or reject experimental data long enough to get its footing, how much longer can an old and creaky theory, buttressed by the reputations and influence and political power of hundreds of established practitioners, continue to hang in the air even when the results upon which it is premised are exposed as false?

The hagiographies of science are full of paeans to the self-correcting, self-healing nature of the enterprise. But if raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science’s approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now “refuted” by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now. Such regress has happened before: In the nineteenth century, the (correct) vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy was replaced by the false belief that scurvy was caused by proximity to spoiled foods. Many ancient astronomers believed the heliocentric model of the solar system before it was supplanted by the geocentric theory of Ptolemy. The Whiggish view of scientific history is so dominant today that this possibility is spoken of only in hushed whispers, but ours is a world in which things once known can be lost and buried.

And even if self-correction does occur and theories move strictly along a lifecycle from less to more accurate, what if the unremitting flood of new, mostly false, results pours in faster? Too fast for the sclerotic, compromised truth-discerning mechanisms of science to operate? The result could be a growing body of true theories completely overwhelmed by an ever-larger thicket of baseless theories, such that the proportion of true scientific beliefs shrinks even while the absolute number of them continues to rise. Borges’s Library of Babel contained every true book that could ever be written, but it was useless because it also contained every false book, and both true and false were lost within an ocean of nonsense.

Which brings us to the odd moment in which we live. At the same time as an ever more bloated scientific bureaucracy churns out masses of research results, the majority of which are likely outright false, scientists themselves are lauded as heroes and science is upheld as the only legitimate basis for policy-making. There’s reason to believe that these phenomena are linked. When a formerly ascetic discipline suddenly attains a measure of influence, it is bound to be flooded by opportunists and charlatans, whether it’s the National Academy of Science or the monastery of Cluny.

This comparison is not as outrageous as it seems: Like monasticism, science is an enterprise with a superhuman aim whose achievement is forever beyond the capacities of the flawed humans who aspire toward it. The best scientists know that they must practice a sort of mortification of the ego and cultivate a dispassion that allows them to report their findings, even when those findings might mean the dashing of hopes, the drying up of financial resources, and the loss of professional prestige. It should be no surprise that even after outgrowing the monasteries, the practice of science has attracted souls driven to seek the truth regardless of personal cost and despite, for most of its history, a distinct lack of financial or status reward. Now, however, science and especially science bureaucracy is a career, and one amenable to social climbing. Careers attract careerists, in Feyerabend’s words: “devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes ‘scientific progress’ in many areas.”

If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a t-shirt reading “Science: It works, b—es!” The hero of the recent popular movie The Martian boasts that he will “science the sh— out of” a situation. One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled “I f—ing love Science!” (a name which, combined with the group’s penchant for posting scarcely any actual scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath, “What you truly love is pictures”). Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play dress-up as scientists—Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples— but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists.

At its best, science is a human enterprise with a superhuman aim: the discovery of regularities in the order of nature, and the discerning of the consequences of those regularities. We’ve seen example after example of how the human element of this enterprise harms and damages its progress, through incompetence, fraud, selfishness, prejudice, or the simple combination of an honest oversight or slip with plain bad luck. These failings need not hobble the scientific enterprise broadly conceived, but only if scientists are hyper-aware of and endlessly vigilant about the errors of their colleagues . . . and of themselves. When cultural trends attempt to render science a sort of religion-less clericalism, scientists are apt to forget that they are made of the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity and will necessarily imperil the work that they do. The greatest friends of the Cult of Science are the worst enemies of science’s actual practice.
[All emphasis added]

Militant Anthropology: A Science Lost

Turning Anthropology from Science into Political Activism

Beginning in the 1960s, a movement developed in academia with the aim of transforming scholarly pursuits into instruments of social change. It was motivated by intellectually fashionable ideas, such as Marxism and feminism, and by a trendy antipathy towards Western Civilization in general. Eventually it overwhelmed the humanities and deeply affected the social sciences.

The impact of the movement on my field, anthropology, was varied, since anthropology, with its four sub-disciplines, spans the range of scholarly activity from the physical sciences through the social sciences to the humanities. Three of those sub-disciplines (archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistic anthropology) have remained mostly unscathed by the efforts to transform anthropology into another politically correct university outpost.

But the largest of the four, sociocultural anthropology (the study of social and cultural variation around the world), has been greatly distorted. It has been redefined from a science to an instrument of political ideology.

It is very revealing that in 2010, the executive committee of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the discipline’s major professional organization, dropped the word “science” from its mission statement, and elsewhere. Since then the organization has focused on trendy issues such as the environment, violence, climate change, race, etc.

The AAA now wants “to help solve problems” rather than to understand and explain reality. Different sections have appeared within the AAA reflecting radical politics, such as the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Association for Queer Anthropology (their designation), and other internal organizations that are highly politicized. Committees expend much energy on political issues and the formation of task forces like the Global Climate Task Force and the Task Force on Race and Racism.

One element in politicized anthropology is the repudiation of the West’s colonial past. Western expansion, as seen from this perspective, was not a phase in history, similar in many respects to the phenomenon of cyclical empires that goes back to the beginning of civilization, but rather an abiding sin for which activist anthropologists have vowed to make amends.

One of them is UC Berkeley professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who has often called for the redefinition of anthropology from an academic discipline to what she calls “forensic” anthropology. (See, e.g. her essay “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology” in the June 1995 issue of Current Anthropology.) What she means by that is that anthropology should move from objective scientific analysis to activism, with a focus on the “crimes” committed by earlier anthropologists.

The self-anointed, self-justified, auto-holy messiahs are everywhere. At least here they removed the designation as a "science" from their self-description. But their crusade should not retain the name, "anthropology", either; the activity's name should reflect "personal retribution through self-righteousness".

Read it all, including comments if you have time, THERE.

Biased Science Is NOT Science, It Is Just Narrative Confirmation

Science must be rigorously tested and monitored like any business which feeds at the public teat. The ongoing revelations of Leftist corruption reveal what happens in a political monoculture, especially one which is not interested in actual truth, but rather the support of their agenda. Scientism fans will obviously buy whatever sewage the monoculture produces without questioning either methods, data, or premises.

Liberal bias in academia is destroying the integrity of research
NYPost; Naomi Schaefer Riley

How reliable is academic research? Not very, it seems, after noting that the Journal of Vibration and Control, a reputable academic publication, had to retract 60 different papers over the summer.

The editors concluded that Chen-Yuan Chen, a researcher in Taiwan, had created a “peer-review and citation ring.”

OK, it’s not exactly a “Sopranos” plot. But it’s pretty shady for the world of higher education. Chen went to great lengths to make up fake email addresses and even assume the names of other scientists to write approvingly of his own research.

In a sense, though, he was just exploiting the deep flaws of the peer review system. The academy has become a kind of club where friends give friends flattering assessments of research, which essentially guarantees promotions and tenure.

Here’s how the former editor of the British Medical Journal explained peer review:

“The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This … is little better than tossing a coin.”

But it’s not just the clubbiness of academia that is to blame. There is such ideological uniformity in the ivory tower that no one ever questions the important assumptions behind anyone else’s research.

A forthcoming article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press, describes this problem in detail.

The article, whose lead author is New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, finds that academic psychology has lost nearly all of its political diversity in the last 50 years and that the validity of the discipline has been “undermined” as a result.

And while the authors note that greater political diversity would improve things, nonliberals face a “hostile climate and discrimination.”

Just how bad is the problem? It’s not just that few academics voted for Mitt Romney. At a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Haidt asked the audience by show of hands to identify themselves by their political orientation.

He estimates the resulting ratio of liberals to conservatives at 267:1. If anything, it was probably worse, since many conservatives don’t want to be “outed” to their colleagues.

This ideological one-sidedness, according to Haidt and his co-authors, has consequences far beyond the common bullying of conservative students.

They cite, for instance, a paper about the “denial of environmental realities” by some of their colleagues in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

When subjects exhibit the “denial of the possibility of an ecological crisis” or the “denial of the danger of disrupting balance in nature,” the authors characterize them as tapping into a “primitive” belief system.

In other words, if you don’t subscribe to modern environmentalist propaganda, you might as well be Caveman Og, swinging your club at wooly mammoths. Haidt and his colleagues patiently explain how terms like “balance of nature” and “crisis” are vague.

Since they are not “facts,” it’s not possible to be “in denial” about them. “Disagreement,” they write, “is not the same … as denial.” Such concepts are skipped over in grad school, apparently.

RELATED: UNC philosophy professor warns: ‘Progressive privilege’ abounds in academia

Another paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people “high in right-wing authoritarianism were more likely to go along with the unethical decisions of leaders.”

Forget about defining right-wing authoritarianism. What constitutes “unethical behavior”?

“Not formally taking a female colleague’s side in her sexual harassment complaint against her subordinate (given little information about the case) and a worker placing the well-being of his or her company above unspecified harms to the environment.”

Obviously, if you engage in such behavior, you’re simply a bad person.

Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame, has spent a career trying to combat the groupthink of academia. In his new book, “The Sacred Project of American Sociology,” Smith offers a scathing indictment of his discipline.

In his field of study, the sociology of religion, most professors begin with the assumption that “ordinary people’s naïve experiences of religious faith and sacred practice ought not to be taken seriously on their own terms,” but are better understood through the concepts of “status struggles, coping mechanisms, gender inequalities, class interests, social control, etc.”

In other words, religion is the opiate of the masses. End of argument.

If that’s where you start, it’s pretty clear where you’re going to end up. The only way to combat the production of academic research that simply confirms what liberal academics already believe is by having someone there to question these assumptions.

As Smith tells me, “Knowledge is advanced through the clash of rival interpretations of the evidence.”

The professors must have missed that memo.

Bad Science, and Possibly Even Evil

Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years' Temperatures With "Adjustments" While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year "The Hottest"?

Sure seems that way -- and people have noticed this tendency in their ever-changing adjustments to the temperature record.

But now they may have gone too far -- in order to declare 2015 the "hottest on record," they apparently had to revise and "adjust" the previously declared all-time "hottest on record," 1997.

Because 1997 was more than three and half degrees warmer than 2015 -- going by NOAA's published data.

If they've now adjusted 1997's temperature down by three and a half degrees or more -- thus making the former All Time Hottest Year On Record not particularly hot -- this should be the lead, no?

And this would then reveal a lot of about their practices, where the "adjustments" made to the numbers change so much depending on current political messaging needs, and where all the warming comes from the "adjustments," and not the actual temperature records themselves.

It's simply job protection. Follow the money, like in any enterprise. It has never been science in the Empirical sense: there is no check and balance in the form of additional experiments to independently confirm the data. Data is pretty much dictated by entities outside of any critic's control, and data manipulation - career death to real scientists - cannot be questioned.

Shutting Down the Part of the Frontal Cortex That Prevents Irrationality

Scientists claim they can change your belief on immigrants and God – with MAGNETS

"A bizarre experiment claims to be able to make Christians no longer believe in God and make Britons open their arms to migrants in experiments some may find a threat to their values.

Scientists looked at how the brain resolves abstract ideological problems.

Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), researchers safely shut down certain groups of neurones in the brains of volunteers.

TMS, which is used to treat depression, involves placing a large electromagnetic coil against the scalp which creates electric currents that stimulate nerve cells in the region of the brain involved in mood control.

Researchers found the technique radically altered religious perceptions and prejudice.

Belief in God was reduced almost by a third, while participants became 28.5 per cent less bothered by immigration numbers."

My nomination for Best comment:

"EdCorps
So this study proves that by blocking a persons ability to think critically and reason, they stop believing in God and accept things that are obviously going to harm them. Brilliant. Think about it for a minute, its a liberal making machine, and to make it work, you have to shut down a part of the brain!"

What sort of person would allow his brain to be assaulted in this manner? I'm thinking proto-Atheist.

More Phony Science

Got Incompetence? The Federal Gov't Has Misled Public About Milk For Decades

"If you look up "whole milk" in the government's official Dietary Guidelines, it states pretty definitively that people should only drink skim or 1% milk. "If you currently drink whole milk," it says, "gradually switch to lower fat versions."

This is the same advice the government has been issuing for many years. And it's wrong.

Research published in recent years shows that people "might have been better off had they stuck with whole milk," according to a front-page story in the Washington Post on Wednesday. "People who consumed more milk fat had lower incidence of heart disease."

The story goes on to note that the government's push for Americans to eat a high-carb diet "provokes a number of heart disease risk factors."

As the Harvard School of Public Health's Walter Willett put it, the "campaign to reduce fat in the diet has had some pretty disastrous consequences."

The Post goes on to note that this "has raised questions about the scientific foundations of the government's diet advice."

It should.

Based on flimsy evidence, the USDA first started urging people to eat low-fat diets in 1977. As evidence grew that this advice was misguided — at best — it steadfastly refused to change course.

So what we have here is the U.S. government using its power and might to push Americans — quite successfully — to change their eating habits in ways that likely killed many of them.

If a private enterprise had done this, it would face massive class action lawsuits, its executives would be in jail, and its reputation permanently ruined.

But the government simply brushes off its own disasters, and goes right on telling people what they should and shouldn't eat. The public would do well to tell government officials to stay out of the kitchen."

The US government couldn't develop more distrust of science if it actually tried.

More Bad Science "Fact" Bites The Dirt

If you can call economics a science. But it is used for political policy.

From the Kaus Files:

Mariel, Farewell?

"The law of supply and demand suggests that an increase in immigrant labor will lower wages. That’s what opponents of increased immigration (including opponents of Rubio-style “comprehensive” reform) say. For decades, the major bit of discordant data has been Prof. David Card’s study of the Mariel boatlift — a “natural experiment” in which 125,000 Cubans landed in Miami in 1980. Did they suppress local wages? Card found that they didn’t — a counterintuitive finding often cited in surveys of the academic debate on immigration, such as this New York Times Magazine article

Card documented that blacks, and also other workers, in Miami actually did better than in the control cities. …

Not so fast! Prof. George Borjas, whose work tends to uphold the conventional supply-demand view, has just gone back and reexamined the Mariel data, looking specificially at what happened to less-skilled workers (high school dropouts). It turns out they took a beating!

The absolute wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, as did the wage of high school dropouts relative to that of either high school graduates or college graduates. The drop in the relative wage of the least educated Miamians was substantial (10 to 30 percent). … [E.A.]

Card may have missed this because he lumped high school dropouts in with high school graduates, whose wage was unaffected. (At least 60% of the Marielitos were in the lowest skilled, high-school dropout group.)

Borjas also compares Miami’s experience with cities that had similar growth patterns before the Mariel labor “supply shock” (as opposed to Card’s “control” cities, which were chosen partly because they had similar growth patterns after the shock). Borjas finds “the relative decline in the wage of low-educated workers in Miami is much larger when we compare Miami to cities that had comparable employment growth.” It makes sense that if wages in Miami went down, but you compare Miami only with cities where wages also went down, you’ might miss some of the relative Miami decline.

In both academic and political terms, this is a BFD. It looks like the law of supply and demand works. More immigrant workers translates into lower wages. The most conspicuous, unassailable finding to the contrary has apparently just been demolished. A major prop in the arguments for greater low-skilled immigration (including arguments for amnesty) –‘What about Mariel?’ — would seem to have disappeared, though the other side has yet to be heard from. (And they will be heard from.) Borjas’ study only just went public."

Card compared apples to oranges and got wrong answers. That is the problem in using science - unreplicated and untested for falsification - as political policy. The law of Supply and Demand goes directly and diametrically opposite to Marxist, top down control of everything. The Left will wail and flail at this falsification of "the failure of Supply and Demand economics" in massive immigration influx conditions.

Actual fact: it did and it will affect black Americans and poor people.

Does the Left really care about blacks and the poor? We'll see.

More Bogus Science

Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results

"Bleak" is too generous.

"In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.

Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around. That could be due to scientists leaving out data that undermined their hypotheses, and by journals accepting only the strongest claims for publication."

Every finding should be replicated before publication. And falsifications should be published as well: a falsified experiment is as valuable a piece of knowledge as a supportive experiment.

Peer review and professional journals are still being found to be rife with bogus science. Dependence upon science for use as a source of Truth for use in a worldview is irrational. Scientism can never produce a true view of all reality. Moreover, this problem is already well known, and there is no sign of its abatement. Science is money driven and is always suspect, at least until it is too well empirically validated to warrant further questioning. Even then it is subject to further knowledge becoming available which negates the most trusted principles.

Dangerous Science?

I'm not sure what to think about this.

First almost fully-formed human brain grown in lab, researchers claim


"An almost fully-formed human brain has been grown in a lab for the first time, claim scientists from Ohio State University. The team behind the feat hope the brain could transform our understanding of neurological disease.

Though not conscious the miniature brain, which resembles that of a five-week-old foetus, could potentially be useful for scientists who want to study the progression of developmental diseases. It could also be used to test drugs for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, since the regions they affect are in place during an early stage of brain development.

The brain, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, is engineered from adult human skin cells and is the most complete human brain model yet developed, claimed Rene Anand of Ohio State University, Columbus, who presented the work today at the Military Health System Research

Previous attempts at growing whole brains have at best achieved mini-organs that resemble those of nine-week-old foetuses, although these “cerebral organoids” were not complete and only contained certain aspects of the brain. “We have grown the entire brain from the get-go,” said Anand.

Anand and his colleagues claim to have reproduced 99% of the brain’s diverse cell types and genes. They say their brain also contains a spinal cord, signalling circuitry and even a retina.

The ethical concerns were non-existent, said Anand. “We don’t have any sensory stimuli entering the brain. This brain is not thinking in any way.”

Anand claims to have created the brain by converting adult skin cells into pluripotent cells: stem cells that can be programmed to become any tissue in the body. These were then grown in a specialised environment that persuaded the stem cells to grow into all the different components of the brain and central nervous system.

According to Anand, it takes about 12 weeks to create a brain that resembles the maturity of a five-week-old foetus. To go further would require a network of blood vessels that the team cannot yet produce. “We’d need an artificial heart to help the brain grow further in development,” said Anand.

Several researchers contacted by the Guardian said it was hard to judge the quality of the work without access to more data, which Anand is keeping under wraps due to a pending patent on the technique. Many were uncomfortable that the team had released information to the press without the science having gone through peer review.

Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, said that while the work sounds very exciting, it’s not yet possible to judge its impact. “When someone makes such an extraordinary claim as this, you have to be cautious until they are willing to reveal their data.”"

If the brain is not alive, i.e., it is dead, then why is it useful beyond normal cadaver brains? And if it is, in fact, alive, that would mean that it's neurological connections are firing and that the "not conscious" claim is without proof or merit.

If the brain cells were induced to produce many cells, then that implies metabolic input and life. This smacks of either ethical misconduct or fraud.

Settled Science? Or Totalitarian Control of a Cash Cow by Science Frauds?

It is well known that the Food Pyramid is determined by lobbyists for the food groups, who vie for positions on the diagram. This is political, of course, and an obvious potential for graft rather than an objective source of nutritional information. So what about the government's "dietary guidelines"?

New Article Blasts Feds’ ‘Pseudoscientific Methods’ For Establishing Dietary Guidelines

"A new article by University of Alabama-Birmingham researcher Edward Archer and colleagues Gregory Pavela and Carl Lavie, published this week in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, argues that the conclusions drawn by the federal government's controversial Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) rest on fatally flawed assumptions about unusable data. Consequently, the authors conclude that the DGAC's work—and the research used to support that work—is so off base as to be scientifically useless.

The DGAC, for those not familiar with its work, is a rotating group of academics that's been charged by Congress, since the 1990s, with meeting every five years to recommend broad federal dietary policies.

The new article's criticism of the DGAC is just the latest in a long line of critiques of the group's most recent work. I laid down my own harsh criticism of the DGAC's work in a pair of columns last year. For example, in one I noted that the DGAC was considering sending scolding text messages to obese Americans. In the other I expressed outrage that the DGAC had recommended a host of new food taxes, suggested restricting food marketing, and egged on municipal food bans.

Mine were complaints about the DGAC's outcomes. Archer and his colleagues, on the other hand, argue that the DGAC's inputs are crap."

What follows is only part of the interview; go to Reason for the entire dialog.

"Reason: Why is self-reported data on food consumption (what you refer to as "memory-based dietary assessment methods" (M-BMs) unreliable?

EA: My previous work demonstrated that 60-80 percent of the dietary data from the NHANES is physiologically implausible. That is a scientific way of saying that people could not survive on the amount of foods and beverages they report. Nevertheless, the nutrition community ignores that evidence, and the data from that paper is not addressed in the DGAC report.

Reason: You refer to M-BMs as "pseudoquantitative" data that yield "invalid" results. That's pretty damning. Please explain what you mean.

EA: In our paper, "pseudoquantitative" refers to the data from observational studies in which nothing is actually measured and numbers are assigned by the researchers to whatever the participant thinks (or would like the researcher to think) he or she ate over the past day, week, and in some cases the past decade. It defies scientific and common sense to think that anyone can accurately remember (and will honestly report) the exact amount and specific type of foods and beverages they consumed yesterday (much less last week or last year). Yet this is precisely the evidence the DGAC cite in their "scientific report." Given the pseudoquantitative (i.e., number generating) method, it should come as no surprise that there is over 50 years of unequivocal empirical evidence that data from M-BMs have no valid relationship with actual food and beverage consumption.

Reason: You claim there's no scientific basis for relying on M-BMs. Please explain why.

EA: We argue that the essence of science is the ability to discern fact from fiction, and we presented evidence from multiple fields to support the position that the data generated by nutrition epidemiologic surveys and questionnaires are not independently observable, quantifiable, measureable, or falsifiable. Without objective corroboration it is impossible to quantify what percentage of the reported foods and beverages are completely false, grossly inaccurate, or somewhat congruent with actual consumption. Stated simply, no one knows the amount of "fact or fiction" in M-BM data.

Reason: The federal nutrition guidelines developed by the DGAC rely on M-BMs. Consequently, do the guidelines rest on any empirical foundation?

EA: There is strong empirical evidence on the nutritional status of Americans, but the DGAC ignores it. The DGAC report states that Americans are under-consuming specific nutrients (e.g., vitamins A, D, E, etc..) via M-BM, yet this is directly contradicted by the CDC's objective (biomarkers) evidence that 80 percent of the U.S. population are not at risk for deficiencies in any of those vitamins and minerals (Pfeiffer et al., 2013). The Pfeiffer paper is not cited in the DGAC report; why? This paper suggests that Americans do not have the risks of deficiencies much less the deficiencies or the actual diseases of deficiencies. Fears sell better than facts, but the fears the DGAC causes distract us from the real problems.

Reason: If M-BMs are so unreliable, then why does the federal government craft policy based on that data?


EA:"The confluence of self-interest, institutional inertia, and scientific incompetence has led us to where we are today. The federal government has massively increased spending on nutrition and obesity research over the past few decades, and now spends over $2 billion of taxpayer's money per year. Unfortunately, the people that control that funding are the same researchers that use these anecdotal methods, train the next generation of researchers, and control the publication of scientific papers. As such, new methods and innovative research is stifled. The same researchers are getting funded to do the same research year after year after year. This inertia and self-interest are exacerbated by the exorbitant amount of grant funding established researchers receive. As with many things in life, follow the money."

Reason: Who, if anyone, is best served when food policy rests on false assumptions that are based on bad data?

EA:"In many ways, what we are experiencing is the evidence of Lysenkoism [link]. The government funded researchers control the field by funding only those researchers that use the same flawed methods; they stifle progress by rejecting contradictory evidence, and immediately impugn the integrity and competence of researcher who disagree. Therefore these government funded researchers are the only beneficiaries of the status quo. Importantly, M-BMs are the perfect vehicle to perpetuate an endless cycle of ambiguous findings leading to the ever-increasing federal funding of nutrition and obesity research."

Reason: You told me that your research was controversial. Please explain why that is the case.

EA: The individuals that use M-BMs control both government funding and nutrition journals. Therefore, these individuals control the entire field of obesity and nutrition. As such, they stifle dissent and the publication of contrary evidence that may threaten their grants or their book deals. These government funded researchers realize that once the public understands the deceit (presenting anecdotes as scientific data), their 'pay-day' is over.

Reason: Critics will note, as you disclose in your article, that you've received funding from Coca-Cola. How, if at all, did that funding impact your conclusions?

EA: I always smile at that question. My science speaks for itself, and as such I am irrelevant to the dialog at hand. If I say 2+2 = 4, is it more or less correct because I am currently funded by the federal government? Would it be less correct if I were funded by industry? The validity of scientific findings is independent of the researcher and should be judged on their merit alone. The unsophisticated personal attacks are indicative of individuals that cannot discuss the science.

Perhaps more importantly, I use data the government collected. Any first-year statistics student can download the data from the web and perform the analyses I have conducted. Ask my government funded critics for their data and you will be met with red-tape and massive bureaucracy. I am 100 percent transparent, while they hide behind their universities and refuse access to anyone outside the government-funded oligarchy."

There have been obvious and grinding dietary science errors which affected entire areas of nutrition and food industries. Those include eggs, salt, fats, sugars, wheat and grains, etc. Some have been declared bad-to-evil (salt, eggs), and others as fine or necessary (wheat) and after decades, their status reversed. Saturated fats have been vilified for decades, and now are on the verge of being approved again.

There obviously is no science of direct cause/effect evaluation, because humans vary in their needs, probably single humans varying over their life cycles. The very fact that there ARE dietary guidelines is a malpractice, in the sense of good science. The nutritional status of an individual cannot be judged until there is valid testing of that individual's entire physical status, metabolically and organically, on a sound, empirical basis - for that individual. That is not even on the horizon.

Health sciences are complex and difficult; to have them restricted by elites to self-reported data is both absurd and irresponsible. It smacks of another faux "science" oligarchy attached firmly to the government's ample teat.

Idiots In Science

Pentagon says ‘live anthrax’ inadvertently shipped across US

"Pentagon confirms live anthrax transferred across US

The Pentagon revealed Wednesday that "live anthrax" was shipped, apparently by accident, from a lab in Utah to as many as nine states.

Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren assured "there is no known risk to the general public" and said an investigation is under way. But precautions are being taken for potentially exposed workers in labs where the samples were sent. A U.S. official told Fox News that four people in three companies are being treated for "post-exposure" and being prescribed prophylaxis.

All samples are in the process of being collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The material in question was prepared at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, as part of what was described as a "routine" research process. It was then sent out to Defense Department and commercial labs in nine states -- the shipments were supposed to include only inactive, or dead, anthrax when they were transferred.

"These were supposed to be dead spores anthrax, called AG-1," a defense official said.

But a private lab in Maryland, on May 22, informed the CDC that they thought the samples contained live anthrax. The CDC then informed the Defense Department. According to the Associated Press, the government has confirmed the Maryland lab got live spores, and it is suspected the others did as well, though not yet confirmed."

Incompetence, thy name is "government".

This does seem to confirm that the US Government is playing around with biological warfare. Hopefully from a defense standpoint (wink, wink).

As Predicted?

When an Atheist claims that the bible never makes testable predictions, just refer him to this:

PayPal wants to implant passwords in your stomach and your brain

Or maybe your forehead or your hand or...

Genetic Modification of Human Eggs

First: this absolutely will happen, somewhere in the world; Second: it will be abused.

American scientists are trying to genetically modify human eggs
Exclusive: The new gene-editing method could eliminate inherited diseases from affected families

"American scientists have attempted to modify the DNA of human egg cells using a new gene-editing technique that could eliminate inherited diseases from subsequent generations of affected families, The Independent can reveal.

The research was carried out on ovary cells taken from a woman with inherited ovarian cancer to investigate the possibility of eventually using gene-editing to produce IVF embryos free of the familial disease. The results are yet to be published.

Editing the chromosomes of human eggs or sperm to create genetically modified IVF embryos is illegal in Britain and many other countries because of concerns about safety and the possibility of the technique being used to create genetically enhanced “designer babies”.

However, the development of a simple gene-editing technique which can alter human DNA with extreme precision has raised the prospect of it being used in the future to help couples affected by inherited diseases who would like children free of the family mutations."

The race to create a super-race is on. This technique will absolutely be abused by its use by tyrants to create super soldiers, assuming that they don't get enough nano-drones and droids to satisfy their needs. It will be the same as Iran/nuclear bombs redux, only on a different level. And the technology is out of the bag, now, so it will be refined for use on humans.