The Washington Post, famous for its outside-of-the-box thinking on scientific matters, has published a list of the worst ideas of the last one hundred years (sorry for the hyperbolifics in the title). Not surprisingly, science shows up not one, not two, not four, but three times. First, medical science, then technology, then geography.
The sciences better start getting serious, or else they will be relegated to the same mystical voodoo cesspool as Astrology, Psychology, Womanly Studies, and the feisty offshoot of Womanly Studies, Wicca.
Here’s my list of the top ten worst ideas of the last one hundred years (considering not just science, but all ideas):
(1) NASA (QED, QED)
(2) Nuclear Physics (QED TBA)
(3) The Apollo Program (QED)
(4) Special Relativity (QED)
(5) Quantum Mechanics (QED TBA)
(6) Abortion / Feminism (QED, QED)
(7) Asia (QED, QED, QED)
(8) Bombing the moon (QED)
(9) Micro-Evolution (QED, QED)
(10) Bayes theorem (QED)
(10) Dark Matter/Anti-Matter (QED, QED)
(10) More-than-three dimensional space (QED)
(10) Brian Greene/Stephen Hawking (QED)
I don’t yet have QED links for all of these, but you can find additional expliceration of these ideas, such as Brian Greene, in my comprehensive Science and Math Defeated Glossary of Terms.
Professor Kent Hovind is a Micro-Evolutionary Biologist who received his M.A. of World Science from Liberty University. He was recently incarcerated because, in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., he merely violated the law. Yet, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hovind continues his academic studies while in prison.
His thesis adviser, Lecturer in Science Studies PZ Myers, has just announced on his Tweetler that Hovind has completed his doctoral dissertation. Naturally, Hovind couldn’t make the announcement himself as he is too busy being persecuted by Macro-Evolutionist prison guards. Myers notes in his review that Hovind makes a complete mockery of his Macro-Evolutionist opponents, and does so with admirable clarity available to a know-few-things audience. However I suspect the suggestion that it could be read by 2nd graders is a wee bit of Anti-Semitic Exaggeration.
So what are my feelings about this? First, I’ve documented my thoughts regarding Micro-, Macro-, and Middle-of-the-road-Evolution elsewhere. I.e., E.g., E.g., E.g., and E.g.
Frankly I think this a disaster for the public understanding of science. All of your first red flags should be raised by the fact that Hovind, an otherwise mainstream Muslim scholar, has colluded with PZ Myers, a complete quacker. Let’s review the dossier on Myers, as documented by the well-known Scientologist organization Wikileaks (say what you will about Scientology, but they do good research).
(1) PZ Myers has been known to participate in fraud documentaries funded by long discredited neoliberal Michael Moore, followed by disingenuous denials thereof.
(2) PZ Myers has trouble speaking in complete sentences.
(2a) (2) is not surprising, since PZ Myers received his alleged PhD in Science from the notorious degree mill “DePauw” college, which is a knock-off anyway.
(4) PZ Myers has been known to be generally crazy. See the upcoming DSM-V for details.
So the moral of the story is, we should resist the influence of these so-called “micro” evolutionists. Scientific consensus shows that Micro-Evolution simply doesn’t occur. In fact, it’s logically impossible that it ever could occur. If something Micro-Evolved into something else, it would merely be that other thing. Take a course in modal logic, why don’t you?
Furthermore, it’s not clear yet what Muslim interest is being pushed in Hovind’s work. He’s been fairly secretive about his religious beliefs up till now. But I assume if someone reads his thesis, evidence will emerge. The fact that he is now conspiring with as eminent a pseudo-intellectual as PZ Myers should worry us – especially since Hovind is in prison. Will Myers become the new Micro-Evolutionist front man? We shall see, we shall see, we shall see.
Last Thursday the United States Supreme Court, led by Sony Sotomoto, finally made a decision in the ongoing class action suit called Roe v. Wade, legislating once and for all that insurance companies cannot use their lavish tax breaks to give bonuses to doctors for performing abortions. The court’s decision was only loosely based on an historic agreement reached in 1885 called the “Dawes Act.” It’s no wonder that the Court decided to enforce this agreement only now, after Obama appointed the first American Indian to the bench. But ethnic is as ethnic does.
What is interesting to me in these debates is that no one pays attention to the science involved in this issue. As you can see by this astrological drivel, even the scientists don’t pay attention to the science. This is not surprising since, as Carl Hempel demonstrated, specialists frequently resist the truth in favor of their current theories.
So what is the science of abortion? Consider the following argument, which uses the scientific method:
(1) Abortions cannot be performed on unliving humans without unalienable rights to dreams, friends, and life [intuitive premise]
(2) Abortions are abortions [transitive property]
(3) If something is aborted, there must be a good reason for aborting it [from 2]
(4) If something is aborted, it was justified [adjusting the consequent; from 3]
(5) If something is aborted, it therefore was a living human with rights, albeit alienable, with respect to dreams, friends, and life [modus pondles; from 1 and 3]
(6) But 4 and 5 yield a negation of 2 [abductive disjunction of parts]
(7) Abortions, if they exist, must be unjustified [metaphysical necessity; ontological argument]
_____________
(8) Therefore, human beings are alive, and are not subject to a negation of at least some of the rights detailed in 1 [principles of logic; science]
It seems to me that this paradigm, a la cartes Thomas Küng, better explains the facts. Pro-Choicers and Pro-Lifers can whine all they want, but the truth is plain for all to see. My argument shows that abortions don’t exist but would be unjustified if they did exist. This shows that both competing paradigms – the Woman Paradigm, and the Religious Paradigm – are misguided. In a sense, like Newtonian physics, both are correct. I don’t have time to explain any further, but if someone wants to continue discussion in the comments they are more than welcome. As I’ve been known to throw my pearls to swine, I might respond.
First, a brief history of the space program: As readers of this blog will know well, the Apollo 1 astronauts, like Benazir Bhutto, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and most recently Ted Kennedy, are dead. NASA said it wanted to send them to the moon, but instead they died. Next, NASA tried to kill the Apollo 13 astronauts, who have been immortalized in several conspiratorial Tom Hanks movies. More recently, NASA blew up the Challenger, and for a twofer blew up Columbia.
So it should come as no surprise that NASA recently embarked on an abstruse failed mission to blow up the moon. As explained by Discover Magazine, none of the objectives were achieved. We just incinerated billions of dollars on the surface of an uninhabitable planet (by any relevant standard the moon is a planet). Stephen Hawking has read too many J.R.R. Martin novels; we will never colonize the moon. It was ridiculous anyway for “scientists” to think we could find water in outer space. Outer space is a vacuum, and water is a thing.
As Cicero says to his inamorata, Artemis, “a vacuo abhorret aqua, equo ne credite.”
I have been arguing that the argument of the Bell Curve, that Asians are superior, is a bad argument. Recently a line judge in the Serena Williams – Kim Clijsters tennis match gave (unnecessary) confirmation of my point:
New research has demonstrated that women prefer to mate with men who are already in a committed loving relationship. I have to hand it to Melissa Burkley for doing such a masochistic study with intellectual honesty. Her work shows that in addition to being less intelligent and inferior generally, women are also less moral than men.
Now most would think that this is nothing to worry about; sure, women have evil intentions, but surely no man would fall for it. Yet it turns out that women have an innate ability to dull a man’s cognitive faculties, according to new research. This is precisely how women are able to capture men in their adulterous traps.
Therefore men in relationships should be especially on guard when talking to women and should act on the assumption that they want to commit adultery.
Recent scientific analysis has shown that higher levels of testosterone makes women more likely to have jobs, and furthermore more substantial jobs (say, a banking job rather than a teaching job). This proves the age old folk wisdom that says women are best fit for non-job-related activities, such as creating food or going for walks.
So William Dembski – in addition to histrionically closing discussion after my simple yet devastating objection to his ego-maniacal self-praise made him “weary” – has now deleted my comment altogether on The Panda’s Thumb. Several individuals, including Mr. Tomato Guy, have asked for the original comment. Although my victory over Dembski is now being trumpeted throughout the scientific community, I’ll post it here for posterity.
notedscholar
08/19/2009
11:39 am
Not to burst your bubbles, but this isn’t actually a pro-ID article. It’s more about math than anything else.
Go see over at the Panda’s Thumb where my very, very simple objection to Dembski’s theories makes him go totally berserk and shut off all comments for the blog. Talk about a lack of an open mind.
Why does he claim he shuts them off? Because he is “weary.” In addition to being very womanly (see #7 here), this response to me shows how Dembski absolutely hates peer-review. They always act like they want peer-review, but when they get an actual peer (me) to review them, their brains shut off. Amazing.
We knew robots were smart. And we knew they were evil. But did we know they were dishonest? New research, linked in the last word of the previous sentence, shows that robotic technology tends toward lies. Now you might say, “The robots are lying to each other, not us.” But according to Professor Wendy Berry Mendes, lying to yourself is the same as lying to others. And according to Professor Robert Feldman, liars are everywhere. Ergos, lying robots, if allowed to “evolve” as the original article states, will eventually be everywhere, and lying to everyone. This is horrifying.
Attentive readers will have noticed that I have never before talked about Crows. If you look at this frightening picture you will understand:
"OMG: Crows," by Arthur Rackham, courtesy of Wikimedia
First I heard a terrifying story on NPR, where co-Professors of doom Kevin Mcgowan and John Marzluff explain how crows can single out individual humans for mass rejection by the worldwide crow community. Can you believe it? If you anger one crow, it will squawk at you around other crows, who will then learn your face and squawk at your around more crows, until it gets around to every crow ever born. That’s terrifying. So wherever Professors McGowan and Marzluff go, crows go crazy around them, following them and shrieking at them, rather like Nazgul.
But I wasn’t going to post on it. Yet today I sit down in my Lazy Boy Chair with my cup of coffee, light a cigarette, open up my fresh New York Times on Google News, and what do I see? A horrifying myth come true. Turns out, like the classic Aesop Children’s Horror says, crows will use jagged rocks to raise water levels in order to do things like drink water at the bottom of the pale, or (more likely, says the latest science) gorily tear apart worms with their sharp beaks, probably just to vomit it back up into the quivering and moist mouths of their young.
Speaking of birds regurgitating, let’s bring this full circle to my previous post on the genetic inferiority of Asians:
Attentive readers will recall a post I wrote awhile back introducing the issues of The Bell Curve. I strongly suggest you read, or reread that post, as it is intended as a prelude to the following material.
Chuck Murray and Dick Hernstein argue in The Bell Curve that Asians and their culture are superior to other races and cultures. They do this primarily through an archaic Roman method known as “intelligence testing.” But had Murray/Herstein bothered with reality testing, invented by Freud, they would have realized how very wrong was their conclusion. The proposition that Asians are a superior race is logically incoherent, not to mention demonstrably false. I’ll review some of the evidence for the inferiority of the continent of Asia.
I.1.i. What counts as Asia?
First, some notes on my parameters: by “Asia” I mean primarily the countries of China and Japan, and by extension Mongolia, Thailand/Taiwan, Tibet, and North Korea. I except India (and by extension Pakistan), since Desi culture is both delightful and properly understood as being from the sub-continent, which by definition cannot be Asia. For those of you who cannot read, here is a map with the area of my concern circled in red:
II.2.ii. The Japanese mind is perverse: anime
Anime is perhaps the most disgusting form of art ever conceived. It should not surprise us that anime was invented during the Nazi period, when the Japanese worshiped the sun and committed genocide against their Japanese brothers in Manchuria. According to biologists at the University of Michigan, anime indeed derives from mental defects in the Japanese. For example, “When a character gets extremely mad at something, a stylized vein might appear on their forehead or fist.” This is said by the UM biologists to be “[not realistic],” who quote Kurt Hoffman as saying that “this gets carried to extremes, as in the manga where an identical vein pops up three different places on the back of a guy’s hand.” An much more perverse example is the “bloody nose” in anime. Consider the findings of the UM researchers:
A bloody nose doesn’t mean that a character is actually injured – rather, it means that he (the afflicted character is seldom a she) is thinking lustful thoughts and/or looking at a beautiful woman. But what does the bloody nose have to do with lust? Gilles Portras, author of The Anime Companion, wondered the same thing: “So I asked a few Japanese and got a variety of pseudo-scientific, and occasionally embarrassed, explanations about humidity and blood pressure. But the best response I got was from one fellow who simply recounted that when he was a child he was told by his mother that if he stared at a pretty woman he would get a bloody nose.”
Pseudoscience and child abuse in one package! But without further ado, consider an interesting showcasing of Japanese anime in its aesthetic and narrative perversion:
III.3.iii. The Japanese mind is perverse: game shows
Attentive Internet users will notice that the dictatorship in Japan regularly censor Japanese game shows on Youtube. Nevertheless, a few slivers of truth sometimes shine through, revealing to us the incomprehensible, cruel, pyschotic nature of Japanese real life entertainment. I don’t need to explain, I’ll just post several disturbing examples. Send your children to bed unless you want them to have dreams filled with weirdness.
OMG #1:
OMG #2:
OMG #3:
IV.4.iv. Japanese food is disgusting (and poisonous)
Try ordering food at a Japanese restaurant sometime. Guess what you’ll get instead? Creatures, mostly dead, uncooked, pulled directly out of the ocean.
Consider the following ven diagram showing the mathematical superiority of Western food to Japanese food:
Now, the same principle is true about authentic Chinese food, but unfortunately that comparison cannot be represented visually. Authentic Chinese food, due to the fact that it is, unlike Japanese faux-food, cooked, and furthermore actually colorful, gives the illusion that it is tasty. But the taste is toxic, like something from a landfill, or China.
V.5.v. Asians do not have creative minds
A common myth about Asians is that they are good at the piano. Consider this racial documentary by Ellen Degenerate:
Yet if you pay careful attention, you’ll notice that this cute little Asian girl, like all cute little Asian girls, is actually a robot. Asian children are forced to “learn” piano at a very young age. But then, when they grow up, they end up a travesty like this, capable of only mimicking music from other cultures, producing no creative work of his own. Compare Ellen’s child from the East with the genuinely creative mind of Daniel Johnston:
Or consider this early recording of Bach playing his concerto:
Asians are good at one thing: math and science. Basically they are walking calculators. And the ones that aren’t walking calculators are walking Periodical Tables.
VI.6.vi. Chinese language = incomprehensible
In addition to being partially not really a language, Chinese cannot be understood even by most Chinese people, who obviously can’t memorize 8 billion idiosyncratic symbols, let alone fit them into a grammar. For example, according to John Wycliffe:
[Learning the Chinese language requires] bodies of iron, lungs of brass, heads of oak, hands of spring steel, eyes of eagles, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.
In any case, not realizing it is a book or a menu, children tend to scribble all over Chinese writing, making the original image indiscernible. For example:
Wtf?
Some people think that the Chinese language was actually put here by aliens, and that the real reason I can’t understand it is because aliens are by definition superior and more complex than humans. I find this an admirable explanation, and it would also help explain the Great Wall of China, which serves no identifiable human purpose. But as yet there is no evidence. In any case, before deciding Chinese was put here by aliens, we’d have to actually decipher the gibberish.
VII.7.vii. Asians = short
Although liberals deny it, Asians are in fact shorter than the rest of us. This puts them in league with women, an inconvenient truth for the authors of The Bell Curve. Consider the following diagram of an American, an African, and an Asian, ironically juxtaposed against the actual bell curve which is supposed to make Asians superior. Ask yourself how the bell curve makes sense here. It doesn’t.
Based on the inspirational art of Thomas Kinkade
VIII.8.viii. Japanese horror, Lost in Translation, and the future of Asia
Oh I forgot to mention that Asian women have no waist-to-hip ratios to speak of, which shows that Asians are not evolutionarily advantageous. Anyway, I have given a ton of evidence against The Bell Curve through the scientific methods of Cultural Criticism. Murray and Finkelstein, in The Bell Curve, only use pseudo-math called “statistics,” which is a method thoroughly disproven by Joel Best. Twice. And there is plenty of other material out there. Consider for example the perverseness of Japanese horror movies, which are so intellectually and morally revolting that they regularly have to be remade to be viewable by civilized people. Or, if you want a real education, take a look at the host of evidence showcased in the interpretive documentary Lost In Translation. Some people think the portrayal of Asia in that documentary is inaccurate and therefore racist. Well, it’s not.
"Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child."
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
