As promised, I’m going through the three papers from last week about the re-programming of adult cells into an embryonic-like phenotype. Since it is three papers I’ll go through first what’s common to all three, and then what each group did special.
First of all, let’s summarize the method one more time.
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Anyone else want to venture a guess as to what that ending was about?
To those who haven’t seen it – I’d avoid going below the fold – it will be a spoiler.
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Last week we discussed the nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be Surgeon General of the United States, and our concerns considering his anti-gay views.
Now Jim Burroway has done a thorough dissection of Holsinger’s attempt to use science to advocate for homophobic policies in his church and it’s about as skewed and cherry-picked as something Paul Cameron would advocate.
This is of significant concern as the Surgeon General is supposed to be a science educator, someone who informs the public about medicine and health-related issues. The fact that this nominee has abused science previously to bash homosexuals is a sign this is yet another unqualified nominee being advanced to a scientific position for political reasons. Write your senator, call or send an email. This man should not be Surgeon General of the United States.
It’s a good read, also check out MarkCC’s review
It’s another example of cranks not recognizing talent – or rather the absence of it. And Sean Carroll hits pretty hard in his review making the point that there are so many basic errors in the book that Behe isn’t doing ID any favors. He ends with this:
The continuing futile attacks by evolution’s opponents reminds me of another legendary confrontation, that between Arthur and the Black Knight in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Black Knight, like evolution’s challengers, continues to fight even as each of his limbs is hacked off, one by one. The “no transitional fossils” argument and the “designed genes” model have been cut clean off, the courts have debunked the “ID is science” claim, and the nonsense here about the edge of evolution is quickly sliced to pieces by well-established biochemistry. The knights of ID may profess these blows are “but a scratch” or “just a flesh wound,” but the argument for design has no scientific leg to stand on
The article included this picture – which I am shameless stealing from now on to mock this tendency:
CREDIT: JOE SUTLIFF, AFTER MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
I think Carroll was channeling one of my commenters…
Ever since I heard the link I was hoping for something more solid than the weak associations I was hearing about on NPR and other news sources. It seemed very preliminary, and a bit worrisome that, especially in the foreign press, that they were claiming things like the New Orleans/Katrina disaster was the first example of a global warming disaster. The evidence simply wasn’t conclusive and in general in science, results need to age. It’s like cheese or wine, you wait for the results that get better with time, and you have to be patient.
I’m reading now in New Scientist that the hurricane link, when evaluated through proxy-data over about 3 centuries, is pretty weak. (Nature article here)
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And finally, we come to the final card. Perhaps industry’s strongest card–“we’ll lose money”–is not really denialism, but it is what motivates so much of the bad rhetoric in public policy debates.
And of course, the truth is more nuanced. Proposals for reform create new opportunities, and many businesses have thrived under the very proposals they said would wreak havoc. |
“Wall Street…has greeted practically every important market regulation introduced in this century with howls of dismay and predictions of disaster. In 1934, the head of the New York Stock Exchange told Congress that if the Securities Exchange Act, which became the foundation of market regulation in the U.S., was made law there was a chance that stock trading in the U.S. would be “entirely destroyed.” Needless to say, it wasn’t. In 1975, when the S.E.C. abolished fixed commissions, the Street claimed that its business would be demolished. Instead, after transaction costs fell, trading volume shot up. And in 2000, when the S.E.C. required companies to disclose material information to all investors, rather than just to insiders, we were told that this would strangle the flow of information to the market and make stock prices swing wildly. But, as numerous academic studies have found, it has actually done the opposite…” James Surowiecki, Over There, New Yorker Magazine, Feb. 2, 2007.
Ben Goldacre at Bad Science is leading the way on opposing this new absurdity of “electric smog”, and one of it’s leading proponents in Britain, Julia Stephenson.
It’s really too easy. Remember the crank HOWTO? Well, she’s just about a perfect example.
It all started when she got wifi in her apartment…
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I see that Tim Blair has decided to quote mine me. As part of my analysis of Cockburn’s crankery I made the following statement.
Below the fold I’ll summarize Cockburn’s arguments and how they use the denialist tactics, George Monbiot’s responses (including his amazing crank-fu!) and discuss why in the future we may start seeing global warming denialism from the left as well as the right.
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It’s important to remember both the left and the right have anti-scientific tendencies, the left’s just tend to be less religious, less world-threatening and more woo-based. My brother recently told me about moving to California, “they don’t believe in Jesus here, just bullshit” in reference to the woo-based beliefs of large portions of the population. The risk of unscientific tendencies is when people with potential to become cranks see a scientific theory as a threat to some overvalued idea they hold dear. Sometimes the over-valued idea isn’t even a bad quality, it can be compassion – but taken to an extreme. If the left starts to see global warming policy as a money-grab by the elites, expect to see more left wing crankery and climate denial based on conspiratorial beliefs about carbon markets.
I suspect this is what has happened to Alexander Cockburn, a lefty who has gone over the deep end, on what appears to be suspicions of a conspiracy to further defraud and hurt poor countries using global warming science.
Basically, I was saying that the origins of anti-scientific arguments are based on certain overvalued ideas that the left has as well as the right. Neither is completely free of unscientific movements. How does Tim Blair read my statements?
That this means there is no consensus on global warming science!
CONSENSUS LESS CONSENSY
Mark Hoofnagle predicts:
In the future we may start seeing global warming denialism from the left as well as the right.
But … but … the debate is over! And it’s been over for 15 years, according to Al the Colder:
I actually can’t figure out exactly what his reasoning was here. Does it mean that left wing crankery somehow disproves science? That Alexander Cockburn, a political writer, disagreeing with global warming science is proof of no consensus? This is classic crank logic here though. A single sentence out of context proves they’re right! There is no consensus! If any left-wingers think something stupid the science is untrue!
Sadly, he doesn’t allow comments without registering (and he isn’t registering anyone new). Basically, they all sit around in a circle-jerk making fun of my last name (I’m being persecuted!) and acting like it’s some great coup that Tim Blair could take half of a sentence out of an essay saying something completely different, and warp it into something absurd.
What a moron.
**Update** Blair has suggested that I’m made unhappy by the attention I’ve gotten from his blog and the Blairites. Quite the opposite. The thing about running a blog on denialists and cranks is that you’re going to be attacked. I’m mostly amused when it happens. And besides, the Blairites don’t troll like others have – the 9/11 truthers come to mind. If anything they’re very polite, if a little touchy. I don’t mind having them around at all and am not so afraid of trolling (or just dissent) that I create a gated community of people who agree with me.
After yesterdays pathetic article from the WaPo suggesting that scores were “up” (whatever that means under the moronic patchwork that evolved under the law) it was nice to see the NYT get it right. Their article exposes the joke of state standardized testing in response to the law, and further demonstrates how meaningless standardized testing is as a way to reform schools.
The law requires that all students be brought to proficiency by 2014, but lets each state set its own proficiency standards and choose its own tests to measure achievement.
In essence, the report issued today creates a common yardstick of proficiency, by examining the minimum proficiency score on each state’s tests of reading and math and then determining what the equivalent score would be on the math and reading components of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results illustrated starkly that some states’ standard for proficiency are much lower than others’.
For example, an eighth grader in Tennessee can meet that state’s standards for math proficiency with a state test score that is the equivalent of a 230 on the national test. But in Missouri, an eighth grader would need the equivalent of a 311.
And while a Mississippi fourth grader can meet the state’s reading proficiency standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on the national test, a Massachusetts fourth grader would need the equivalent of a 234. Such score differences represent a gap of several grade levels.
In some cases, the differences between one state’s proficiency standards and another’s were more than twice as large as the national gap between minority and white students’ reading levels, which averages about 30 points on the national assessment test, according to Grover J. Whitehurst. Mr. Whitehurst is the director of the education department’s Institute of Education Sciences; he and the Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, spoke to reporters about the report by telephone on Wednesday.
NCLB is a joke, and based on this administrations track record on, well, everything, no one should be surprised. What is most shameful about this whole debacle of a law, is the cynical use of education as a political tool. The architects of this policy had to know that the results in Texas were a scam, but that didn’t stop them from pushing it nationally to create a false statistical bump in test scores that they could use to claim a victory in education reform.
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Suricou Raven guessed it–after calling your opponent “Unamerican,” you call them “Communist.” Here, use loaded phrases, such as “the proposal smacks of the paternalistic ‘command and control’ of Communism.” |