Slashdot Mirror

... [Watson] is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address.

These thoughts were a continuation of an important theme in his new book Avoid Boring People:

... there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Full citation here

While your family is mixed, it looks like the majority are not that way. Check out the marker maps:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/08/genetic-map-of-europe-again.php

Since he had no scientific basis for that "correlation" whatsoever and was instead basing it on his personal interactions with black employees...

I beg to differ.

Straight out of Newton's Rape Manual.

If you believe that there is no such thing as human nature, you have quite a bit to learn. From our innate ability to form languages, to our universal preference to find symmetric facial features beautiful, there are countless examples of attributes that apply to all of us. Money may be a human invention, but even monkeys will trade food for sex. We cannot choose to be other than what our nature makes us, any more than we can choose to have 8 limbs.

Indeed! English has a perfectly good person pronoun: he in the subjective, him in the objective, and his in the possessive. It's not biased to write using that pronoun: it's standard. It's been used for centuries. You might say that Shakespeare used "they", but he used he far more often, as most writers did for centuries.

For fuck's sake, it's a pronoun. Changing it won't erase gender equality! Of course any sensible reader will interpret "when a scientist runs a PCR on his genetic sample" to mean a male or female scientist. Obviously. It's just grammar. Mark Twain commented on the corresponding problem in German in his great "The Awful German Language"

Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
  Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
  Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English
maiden?
  Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera."

Yet nobody claims German is a sexist language. If you insist on twisting the fine English language to eliminate a purely grammatical gender distinction that's not actually a problem, you might as well go all the way and start talking about Newton's Rape Manual.

There are two ages which most pro choice people would argue:

Now let's examine the second point that you made.

2) The time of reasonable fetal viability outside the mother. Before a certain point, a fetus cannot survive if removed from the mother or should the mother die. Even if care is immediately available, there is still no saving it. Thus in a very real way it is a part of the mother, not an individual entity.

This point is moot. The funding isn't there (for moral reasons), but a fetal transplant is rapidly Approaching Possibility (linked from another person that responded to you).

At the point when transplanting a fetus becomes possible, this argument will either need to be expanded to include infants and the mentally disabled (because neither of these would be able to survive alone), or discarded.

The whole problem with this debate is that neither side is willing to go all in. You need to either ban abortions completely (even for rape and incest), or allow them globally for anything that doesn't fit whatever definition is used for life. Most of the models that I've heard people use would not include infants as life, meaning that they could be "aborted" (killed).

Your first point is wrong. Not just a little wrong. A lot wrong. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are repeating someone else's bullshit.

Your second point, if not already wrong will be before too long.

Finally, your entire premise was false. The original poster was "distorting" no facts. In fact, he said that the same logic that could justify abortion of a fetus could be used to justify the murder of an infant. His argument, unlike yours, was made up of arguable points.

I'm afraid all of this means that I'll be revoking your internet posting privileges. Please unplug your router so that the serviceman can pick it up when he stops by your house this evening.

The article doesn't mention it, but I wonder how this interacts with retrovirus guided evolution.

(a random google link: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/02/retroviruses-evolution.php)

These linked-to articles are intellectually dishonest on two levels:

1. They do away with uncomfortable detail by drawing group boundaries that suggest homogeneous density within. Wouldn't a density plot or a scatter plot of European population genetic substructure be more illuminating?
2. They obscure the true relationships between various peoples by grouping individuals on the basis of their citizenship, and by omitting readily available data about neighboring peoples and European minorities. Wouldn't you like to know how (or whether) Basque, the Jews, and the Armenians - for example - are (or are not) related to various European populations? [If you don't, you probably didn't care about the conclusions in TFA either; so why are you reading this?]

Note that I am not claiming that the studies discussed on the pages I linked to are paragons of integrity and transparency. I wish merely to show that TFAs are giving people a fractional distillate of available information. If you went to school at the Jesuits', you might refer to this sort of clever maneuvering as “interpreting vetted facts” — but I call it “lying with the help of a gratuitous reduction of the data”. If you had any doubts that there is an agenda behind the way data from genetic studies is presented to the public, consider this your wake up call.

These linked-to articles are intellectually dishonest on two levels:

1. They do away with uncomfortable detail by drawing group boundaries that suggest homogeneous density within. Wouldn't a density plot or a scatter plot of European population genetic substructure be more illuminating?
2. They obscure the true relationships between various peoples by grouping individuals on the basis of their citizenship, and by omitting readily available data about neighboring peoples and European minorities. Wouldn't you like to know how (or whether) Basque, the Jews, and the Armenians - for example - are (or are not) related to various European populations? [If you don't, you probably didn't care about the conclusions in TFA either; so why are you reading this?]

Note that I am not claiming that the studies discussed on the pages I linked to are paragons of integrity and transparency. I wish merely to show that TFAs are giving people a fractional distillate of available information. If you went to school at the Jesuits', you might refer to this sort of clever maneuvering as “interpreting vetted facts” — but I call it “lying with the help of a gratuitous reduction of the data”. If you had any doubts that there is an agenda behind the way data from genetic studies is presented to the public, consider this your wake up call.

http://www.derm.med.ed.ac.uk/06_teaching/redhairgen.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Evolution http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001371.html

There is some research that indicates a link between sex and intelligence here

Testosterone supposedly peaks at around 100 IQ, it declines as IQ increases or decreases. Higher IQ men seem to have lower testosterone, seem less manly, fewer indicators for testosterone.

Nice guys = intelligent guys = low testosterone = Slashdot.

Simple as that.

And short of taking testosterone shots which will perhaps lower intelligence, there is little the "nice guys" can do about the preference of women for the bad boys. Heck then it becomes a male race to the most testosterone laden, the male equivelant of breast implants for the ladies.

[The Beauty Arms race of cosmetics, plastic surgery, fashion, etc. ought to tell guys women are pursuing a few high-testosterone men in a consumerist society.]

Here's a chart that might help you make your decision. Being surrounded by art majors suddenly doesn't seem to be such a bad idea after all.

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/uploaded_images/Picture-1-720552.png

Just because you're well dressed doesn't mean you can't be a good scientist/coder. The old guys knew that...

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/08/cleaning-up-your-nerdy-appearance.php

So, organisms will just take the traits from that make cells of the anti-biotic taking organism resistant to the anti-biotic. Problem solved.

This doesn't happen... the reason animal cells aren't killed by antibiotics is because of fundamental differences between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The ribosomes, used to make proteins are very different. Also, other antibiotics attack DNA gyrase and the formation of cell walls, which animals don't have.

Instead, bacteria can either mutate or readily swap/steal genes from other bacteria* to make proteins to destroy antibiotics (penicillinase), enable them to pump antibiotics out of themselves, or change the site of bacterial action just enough to make the antibiotic no longer work.

To get back on topic, one major problem with a "supercow" is that all the clones would have the same MHC. Genetic diversity at these genes ensures that at least some individuals in a population will be able to present an effective immune response to any pathogen.

*Specifically, pathogenic ones can obtain them from harmless bacteria that have evolved resistance through too much exposure to antibiotics.

Comprehensive review of IQ tests, intelligence, race, class/caste, income level, and so forth:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php

You can apologize later for your unwillingness to discuss real science. (The above focuses too much on race for my taste, and I would again like to mention Eastern Europe as a white third world series of nations, lest this turn into African-bashing.)

I am sure you are aware of Dr. James Watson's recent controversial assertion that blacks are not as "endowed" intellectually as whites. While the few studies I have seen do not support this conclusion at all I am still curious as to know how evolution has made us different (obviously) in other ways.

From your link: "[Watson] is 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really', and I know that this 'hot potato' is going to be difficult to address."

So basically, it's easy to read that as him saying that "black people are stupid".

"Hot potato" is an understatement. The notion of racial superiority/inferiority has proven disastrous for the human race.

The basic argument is that it's silly to think that separate populations had to evolve the same way mentally and physically. This is true. The issue is 'to what degree?': it needs context. On the time scales of the human race, how much differentiation could have even happened? I've read studies upon studies that cite how you are quite possibly more genetically similar to someone who is black (assuming you are white) than you are to your white neighbor. I.e., skin color is not a good measure of overall genetic differentiation. The migrations of populations is complicated. And when you get down to it, it seems more and more like the very concept of "race" is a myth. A few years ago, either Discover or SciAm even did a whole issue focusing on this topic.

Another major obstacle to consider is whether or not the scientists trying to prove that black people are of lower intelligence have a personal agenda... prejudice... bias. And what they hope to ultimately accomplish with their research? Second class citizenship for 'inferior' races? Or just the ability to discriminate based on race during employment screenings, as someone of an 'inferior' race may clearly be less eligible for the job?

It all stinks. And I wouldn't buy into what this guy says just based on the paranoia that there's some cover-up of the truth because of some desire for political correctness. If there were big differences among races in terms of intelligence, they would be well evident by now. As is, it seems to me the most important factor on intelligence is your environment.

Back on topic to the movie... I think the kids being raised in the idiot families certainly get a dose of that idiot culture from their parents, and that may be a more important factor than genetics. The movie doesn't address this, and it's really just a movie. The topic you touched upon with that link though, is a pretty serious matter.

Lamarckian evolution was proved false long ago; just because a group of people isn't educated and therefore doesn't make use of their intelligence does not mean that their children will be stupid.

Individuals differ in intelligence. Intelligence is (partly) heritable. These points follow logically from a basic understanding of Darwinian evolution (not to mention being supported by reams of empirical evidence). Read this, to start (the focus here is on population differences, but heritable individual differences in IQ are even more strongly supported).

"Gifted" people have some unique challenges to overcome. For example thing they seem to be worse at relating to their peers, and have a less successful sex life. This was discussed on Slashdot lately in response to this study:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-i ntelligence.php

In the end that can only make for less happy people.

I think it is best to make less fuss about gifted kids, and make them work on their social skills and ability to integrate with their peers. Their intellegence will inevitably make itself known anyway, and I don't actually trust schools to lead them in any useful direction either.

That is how I am raising mine :)

Anyway, Art has very useful traits:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/uploaded_images/Picture-1 -720552.png

Check out the graph: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/uploaded_images/Picture-1 -720549.png

There are less virgins in CS than English. I was at the wrong school.

I personally think it's unethical to become a biological parent considering all the problems the current 6608952031 are causing, and considering the tens of millions of unadopted orphans out there.

I personally think it's unethical to become a biological parent considering all the problems the current 6608952031 are causing, and considering the tens of millions of unadopted orphans out there.

Well, you can start by realizing that setting "Smart" at an IQ of "110" is a stupid idea in the first place.
However, the article itself, once you stop soundbiting it, is pretty interesting.
I got a kick out of this graph

You don't get it... soon there will be these shirts, with Che talking on the iPhone!

And Viva la revolucion! (no SDK included)!

'Look, instead of talking about how evolution MUST be true just CREATE LIFE IN THE LAB and that will fix it.'

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002541.html

Here is some interesting reading.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.htm l

'Only 51% of physical scientists believe in any form of Darwinian evolution.'

Great. Thats a fine useless number. Now how many believe in more modern views of evolution? 99% or so I would suppose and rest are a few fundementalist crackpots.

- if by race, you mean genetic differentiation related to ancestry in humans.

Of course, much as we can discuss "is there such a thing as a chair" (or any choice of labelling) all day long without any results, we can try to obfuscate the reality of human genetic differences all day long using word games like "there is no such thing as race".

In everyday use though, there is indeed a social component - what is considered "black" in the US might not be considered "black" in Nigeria. For everyday use though, the social conception of race corresponds surprisingly well to the underlying biological reality.

Here is a neat summary of the current state of affairs:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/01/race-current-cons ensus.php

"I. Genetic variation in humans forms clusters that correspond to geography

The fact that one can cluster humans together by geography based solely on their genetic information was most convincingly demonstrated in two papers (the second one is open access) by a group out of Stanford. These studies looked at several hundred variable places in the genome in 52 populations scattered across the globe. The hypothesis was as follows-- on applying a clustering algorithm to these data, individuals from similar geographic regions would end up together.

I've put a representation on the right, where colors represent poplations-- on top is a pattern of variation that would lead to no clustering (the colors all blend one into the next) while on the bottom is a pattern of variation that would lead to clustering (there are subtle but noticable jumps from yellow to green, for example, though there is much variation within each color). Note that the lack of clustering would not mean that all populations are genetically the same (in the top figure, yellow and orange are not "the same" even though you couldn't find a fixed boundry between them).

But indeed, the researchers found the situation corresponding to the bottom figure-- the individuals formed five clusters which represented, in the authors' words, "Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas". Some populations were exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions in biology)-- they seemed to be a mix between two clusters, or could even form their own cluster in certain models.

But in general, the second model in the figure is a good fit for human variation based on the spots in the genome used by these researchers-- continents correspond to clusters, and geographic barriers like the Himalayas or an ocean correspond to those areas where a "jump" from one cluster to the next occurrs.

II. Clusters and race

The fact that humans cluster together based on genetic information could, in theory, be entirely orthoganal to the concept of race. However, at least in the United State (where this has been explicitly tested), this is not the case. The most important reason for this, in my mind, is that the ancestors of European-Americans and African-Americans were not randomly sampled from the globe (there's a bias towards points on the globe that are quite distant), and this non-random sampling accentuates the genetic differences between the two groups. But in any case, the reasons for this are irrelevant to the argument; let's look at the data.

The basis for this assertion comes from a paper (open access) by a different set of researchers at Stanford, who assembled a group of Americans who identified themselves as either African-American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. They followed a similar protocal as the studies in the first section-- they took DNA from all individuals, looked a hundreds of different DNA variants, and applied a clustering algorithm. They then looked to see if their clusters corresponded to self-reported group. And indeed, in 3631 out of 3636 cases (99.85%), the individuals were clustered by the algorithm into the "correct" racial

Read more here, including a picture.

Anybody familiar with history will know Europeans have long rambled across most of Asia. Even today there are fully European looking people in Afghanistan, and most Indians and all Persians and Pakistanis have some or even alot of European ancestry. Despite the name 'European' the 'Europeans' have always lived in parts of Asia.

"Race is based on appearance"

Appearance is certainly what most people go on. As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it can work rather well for determining ancestry. Even in very mixed situations like Brazil, it provides information about ancestry.

Also, you have the 15-85% cliché all mixed up - it really doesn't say very much. For more information on this, see:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002443.html

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/11/race-brazil-seque l.php

If I understand this, they are saying that skin color is not a close match for actual genetic background. In other words, "Black" brazilians are genetically much closer to other brazilians than they are to their supposed African ancestors.

The reason is social: most people with light skin color have mated with others with light skin color, and most of those with dark skin color mate with those with dark skin color. So skin color has been preserved, while the rest of the genes have been pretty thoroughly mixed.

So, at least in this case, "race" really is nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised to see simliar results in the US.

1. The religiousness of scientists is considerably lower than that of the US general public:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001419.html

2. Religions from time to time decides to go a round against science. Religion, as a rule, loses out.

3. The real killer is evolution of course. As the far more eloquent than me John Derbyshire puts it:

http://www.olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentar y/FaithFAQ.htm

"I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God's image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God's image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God's image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there's nothing special about us at all.

Now of course there are ways to finesse that point--intellectuals can cook up an argument for anything, and religious intellectuals, who cut their teeth on justifying some wildly improbable stuff, are especially ingenious--but the cumulative effect of dozens of factlets like this is devastating to the notion that human beings are a special creation. And without that notion, traditional religious belief is holed below the water line. The more you read and learn in the modern human sciences, the more your image of homo sap. fades back into our being just another branch on the tree of life, with all those wonderful features of ours--even language, the most wonderful feature of all--just adaptations, like fins or feathers, with an actual record of the adaptation written, and date-stamped, right there in the genome!"

"Personally, I would be curious to see more of the data that these people collected; maybe even see the actual distribution of this gene by geographic location."

Your wish, my command:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/uploaded_images/MCPH1-37, 000-722163.JPG

I already posted this in reply to a similar post, but since it keeps popping up, it's worth repeating. Svante Pääbos comment on this research from ScienceNOW:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/ 2006/1106/1?rss=1

"Ancient DNA pioneer Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says that this new work is "the most compelling case to date for a genetic contribution of Neandertals to modern humans." Indeed, Pääbo says, he will now search for the haplogroup D variant of microcephalin in his own studies of the Neandertal genome."

Also, what is posited is not extensive interbreeding between humans and an archaic homo lineage, but rather drive-by allele theft. This can be very effective, for reasons explained here:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/11/neanderthal-intro gression.php

From ScienceNOW:

"Ancient DNA pioneer Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says that this new work is "the most compelling case to date for a genetic contribution of Neandertals to modern humans." Indeed, Pääbo says, he will now search for the haplogroup D variant of microcephalin in his own studies of the Neandertal genome."

Also, the point is that the kind of interbreeding posited would not have left mtDNA traces. It pretty much amounts to driveby DNA theft. For more detail, see here:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/11/neanderthal-intro gression.php

A picture is often worth more than a thousand words, etc. - here is a piece of the puzzle:

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/Brains_resize2.jp g

You are slipping wildly between dissing some sort of value-based racism "My race roxx0rs, yours suxx0rs" and the impact of genetic differences on the economies of different countries - these issues are not one and the same. The first one relates to morality and values, the second is almost entirely empirical, and as such is not subject to human morality or wishful thinking.

As for Diamond, I was still "among the (self-) righteous" when I read GGaS. Yet, it struck me after reading it that the jacket didn't match the contents very well - Diamond never "disproves racism" or somesuch, he merely details how different the envioronments where the different parts of humanity have lived after leaving Africa have been. Of course, as we know from Darwinism, different environments tend to produce different evolutionary outcomes...

Let's finish off the discussion with this Jared Diamond article, written and published before he started making the big lecture circuit bucks. Without further ado, I give you 'Guns, Germs and Gonads':

"Nature. 1986 Apr 10-16; 320(6062):488-9.

Ethnic differences

Variation in human testis size

from Jared M. Diamond

THE potential harvest from studies of human testis size, a subject that has received little systematic investigation, is indicated in a paper by R. V. Short (ref. 1), who documents variations between ethnic groups which could be correlated with the incidence of dizygotic twins and breast cancer.

Although measurements of testis size by orchidometry in living subjects are difficult to standardize, they suggest smaller testes in Japanese and Korean men than in Caucasians. Weighing at autopsy is more accurate and showed that the size was twofold lower in two Chinese samples compared with a Danish sample (see figure). Differences in body size make only a slight contribution to these values."

Amazing how conformist a few million in lecture fees can make a man's thinking, no?

Read the whole thing at: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003206.html,

"Those adaptations do not seem to have much if any influence on the mental abilities of people however."

This is, once all the claptrap is cleared away, the major sticking point.

In virtually all forms of intelligence testing, significant differences between various ethnic groups are detected, that are steady over time. (This is the reason we get a steady flow of these kinds of stories.

Also, we are starting to find stuff like geographically determined differences in brain development genes. Hence, I wouldn't be so sure about your assertion.

Of course, lots of other people have sort of sensed this would be the case, and hence many have felt comfortable with propping up the assertion that evolution made an exception for humans starting 50 000 years ago or so, without much supporting evidence. Now that bulwark is slowly starting to give way...

"Yeah, yeah. Arabs don't like jews"

We were discussing Iran, not any Arab country. Oh wait. I get it. You have proven that you know so little about anything that I bet you are one of those hicks who think that Iranians are "Ay-rabs!" This is too funny. Thanks for letting us know that those gawldang towelheads are all the same thing!

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001401.html

Concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program which you deny exists, here is some further documentation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/international/eu rope/31afp-iran.html?ex=1296363600&en=a9b804207336 fb47&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

If you don't know that Iranians are not "Ay-rabs", it is not surprising at all that you know nothing about their nuclear weapons building. I think you operate from a "hate the United States first" M.O. and let everything flow from that, including the idea that the U.S. is the ultimate arch-villain in everything, regardless of the facts.

As for your statement, "Saddam knows there isn't a God"? That is just a statement of your religious faith. You have a faith that there is no God, and you project it on others.

Why should there be an outcry?

There shouldn't be, of course. That was the irony, right? =)

Abiogenesis is quite admittedly a weakly developed and weakly supported field. That is hardly surprising considering that it attempts to address a singular microscopic event hidden in the deep depths of time, and which has left no direct trace.

Again, this is the interesting bit. It's perfectly acceptable and accurate for you to say this. But imagine if Pat Robertson (bleh) were to get on national TV and make the same statement. The flaming arrows would be flying within the hour.

When a debate turns into kneejerking, it's time to make fun of the debaters.

I wouldn't call ID "the end of science", ... On the other hand I've never even heard of radical postmodernism before, so it does not appear to be a particularly signifigant threat to anything.

The "end of science" bit was a reference to that common refrain here on Slashdot, as well as in a few other places (New Scientist editorials, for instance). I agree it is not the general position.

As for postmodernism, the reason you haven't heard of it is that humanities teachers don't go into lecture and say, "Okay class, today we're going to cover postmodernism" any more than scientists go into lecture and say, "Okay class, today we're going to cover philosophical materialism." It's just a technical label; my description was the main idea: that "rationality [is] neither as sure nor as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge."

Half of what you learn in a class is the content; the other half is the teacher's assumptions (assuming you learn anything at all =). This is why a huge percentage of college students and graduates these days will say extremely illogical things like, "If you believe it's true, then it's true for you." If you've heard that, then you've heard postmodernism. In its more radical form, you get people making mind-blowing statements about science being nothing more than a tool of male oppression.

And here is where we get to the real crux of the matter. We are all talking about things that are fundamentally pre-rational. There are (simplifying greatly) three epistemologies at loggerheads here:

1. The worldview that includes these axioms: God, science. [theism]
2. The worldview that includes these axioms: science. [rationalism]
3. The worldview that includes these axioms: nothing. [postmodernism]

(To be more precise, the word "science" here should be replaced with "logic" or "reason.")

Epistemology cannot be chosen rationally because it defines what you consider to be rational; an adherent to any of the above views does so purely on faith. I view postmodernism to be a vastly greater threat to science because it rejects that you can even argue logically. I have heard highly educated people say, "Yes, I agree that you've proved your position. But my [contradictory] position is still true for me."

Witness, then, the appalling rise of alternative medicine, such as homeopathy and energy healing. Of psychic celebrities, like John Edward. Of the dominance of constructivist education in America. You may think this is just good ol' run-of-the-mill superstition, but it's not. Defenders of homeopathy are often highly educated and yet have full confidence in statements like, "It has been established beyond doubt and accepted by many researchers, that the placebo-controlled randomised trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy." Nursing schools teach "healing touch" alongside basic

When exactly did they have food, clothing and money? When exactly did they have education and literacy? How is it that they managed to go to and stay in an unarable land when they were starving? Here is some evidence that people in some countries have distinctly different brains: This is Bruce Lahn's Brain on ASPM and MCPH1

We've been discussing this over at Gene Expression for a bit now.

Note the double quotes there. They are not journalists. Slashdot exhibits little of the professionalism we would expect from a newspaper. The misspellings alone should be enough to convince anyone, especially considering the amount of words written.

I would give Gene Expression as an example of something that while clearly a "blog", has several editors and sticks to much higher standards.

Hot babe theoretical physicists? Or were you thinking of these ones?

The above mentioned countries have a population of 53 million and generated 12.7% of papers, while America, with a population of 288M, published 34%.

One might speculate whether the social democracies with their high taxes and well-funded universities do more hardcore research. Here in America it seems that research is aimed more at the low-lying, commercially-viable fruit.

Yes, it is true. America does less science research per capita than do many of the European nations, especially the countries that Rightwingers love to call "socialist", i.e,. Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. All these countries and some others in Europe publish more science papers (in peer reviewed journals) than does America (some of them publish TWICE as many papers per capita as does America). Gee, I guess that blows away that neoliberal/laisseiz faire argument about America capitalism being the "driving engine behind improving technology, quality of life" etc., and how all those welfare states in Europe are just parasites on America....yawn....

Also, America is even behind 3rd world countries like India & China in terms of science research papers when looked at on a per-capita-wealth basis (numbers of papers per unit of wealth per country). Note on the graph how much to the right America is when compared to, say, India. India publishes more peer-reviewed science papers more capita wealth than does America.

THis is all based on the study entitled "Scientific Impact of Nations" by King for 2004. You can get a link to the pdf version of the paper and see a graph of science papers per per-capita-wealth here.

Well, you learned something today, huh? Now go watch the debate Wednesday and listen to Bush and Kerry tell us about how America is the greatest nation on earth.....

Yeah, if this had come from a more credible source than ESR I might be more inclined to believe it.

Hi own writings have been very questionable, and obviously not well researched.. this one, for example. So, I don't imagine he does much to research other people's writing either. Give him something he wants to believe is true, and he'll eat it up.

This could very easily be an "ESR exploit".. Either a prankster, or someone looking to discredit the "open source community" and its self appointed "leader" could have tossed this one out there knowing he would instantly publish it as his big scoop.

How can this yahoo keep getting press? Why does anyone think that having him as the self appointed mouthpiece for Open Source would be a good thing?

All of his writings show a distinct lack of depth. He has a superficial understanding of most topics he writes on, and quickly exposes that fact. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt in Unix/Linux/Coding. But, beyond that he should STFU.

As an example, check out the ill-advised, simplistic, racist ramblings from his blog: http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001393.html

In the Java essay, he exposes the fact that he has no clue about business financials by comparing the share price of Sun & Red Hat. Anyone who has invested at all knows this is meaningless.. A company with 1M shares @ $100 is worth a lot less than a company with 1B shares @ $33.

So please, ignore the troll and he'll go away.

When is the US going to grow up and recycle and refine spent uranium, instead of trying so hard to bury it in the ground. Other countries have breeder reactors that refine used uranium, meaning less fuel mined, less waste made, and the waste that is made has less radioactivity and half life...

You can blame Jimmy Carter for the fact that we're not doing that. (Why nothing has been done since 1981 to rescind that executive order is a valid question.)