"The science" is trustworthy?

 

The theory of everything that came to nothing?

 

The brain conjures reality?

 

More unsettled than ever?

 

In search of planet IX

 

The first step in becoming a spacefaring civilization?

 

Even empty space can be overthought?

 

JEHOVAH'S Productivity.

 

On the value of the heterodoxy.

 Adult Stem-Cell Cure for HIV?

Wesley J Smith

We must always be cautious about stories touting biotechnological cures. There is a lot of hype out there, but this seems genuine. An HIV/blood-cancer patient seems to have gone into permanent remission thanks to adult stem cells. From the Daily Mail story:

A California man is on the cusp of being declared cured of HIV and blood cancer.

Paul Edmonds, 68, who made international headlines last year when he shared his story, still has no traces of either condition five years after being given a transplant of cells that rid his body of both diseases.

In a new article by the medical team who treated him, doctors said he was officially cured of cancer and two years away from being declared cured of HIV — when he will have gone without any medication since 2020.

The adult (blood and bone marrow) stem cells were donated by a man with a particular genetic predisposition:

He was treated for the cancer with stem cell therapy, which involves replacing stem cells damaged by chemotherapy with healthy ones from a donor — when doctors spotted a unique opportunity: to find a donor with a HIV-resistant genetic mutation.

And, so they did.

To Great Apparent Success

Thanks to the ongoing breakthroughs in gene editing and other approaches, researchers hope to be able to create lines of these particular cells for use against HIV:

Dr Stephen Forman, a professor in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, said the hospital was ‘not stopping there.’ ‘Our researchers are working on creating stem cells that have the genetic mutation that makes them naturally resistant to HIV, among other research initiatives,’ he said.

The “Settled Science”

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that during the great embryonic stem-cell debate, circa 2001-08, the “settled science” insisted that embryonic stem cells were the “gold standard” for future regenerative medical treatments. Those who disagreed were often castigated in the media, among the scientific establishment, and by politicians as “anti-science” or religious fanatics standing in the way of CURES! CURES! CURES!

Well, more than twenty years later, there are zero approved embryonic stem-cell therapies and very few human trials, demonstrating how a “consensus science” that seeks to stifle open scientific inquiry and heterodox advocacy harms the scientific quest for truth.

For those interested in the technical details of this promising approach, here’s a link to the New England Journal of Medicine report

The universe keeps trolling the script?

 

Getting fraud down to a science?IV

 

The big questions remain as big as ever?

 A New Look at Three Deep Questions

Eric Hedin

Ron Coody’s new book, Almost? Persuaded! Why Three Great Questions Resist Certainty, delivers a wide-ranging discussion and analysis of questions, answers, and arguments keenly relevant to the intelligent design community. His background is far from one-dimensional and he has long been engaging people over issues of worldview, evidence, and belief.

With a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and a Master of Divinity followed by a PhD in missiology, Coody is well qualified to address the cutting edges of science, philosophy, and theology. Enhancing his perception of diverse ways of thinking about these questions is his decades-long experience of living and working cross-culturally.

Questions of Consequence

The primary questions addressed here are obviously of deep consequence: Does God exist? Where did life come from? and Is free will real? A refreshing aspect of Almost? Persuaded! is its objective coverage of the broad range of arguments surrounding these questions. 

As I read Almost? Persuaded!, although I have been studying these questions for many years, I found that Coody’s presentation easily held my attention. Moreover, the breadth of his analysis provides new insights and expanded my understanding of developments in history and philosophy.

A Helpful Compendium

On the first question, “Does God Exist?”, Coody’s analytical summary of key philosophers and intellectuals, from Plato to Aquinas to Dawkins, caught my attention. His highlighting of key ideas from over twenty influential thinkers makes for a helpful compendium.

A familiar-sounding argument for design is Coody’s summary of number five of Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways argument from the 13th century:

Working backwards from human experience of designing and building, Aquinas reasoned that the ordered universe and the creatures inhabiting it exhibit properties of design. Design requires a designer….Aquinas thought that the universe needed an intelligent mind to bring it into order. He believed that physical laws lacked the power to organize complex, functioning systems. 

P. 34

Another unique and somewhat amusing contribution is the author’s contrasting of Richard Dawkins with the Apostle Paul on the evidential weight of nature.

As Coody reviews the standard evidence for the fine-tuning of the physical parameters of the universe to allow life to exist, his presentation is accurate and compelling. The Big Bang, Lawrence Krauss’s attempts to redefine the “nothingness” out which the universe arose, Stephen Hawking’s blithe dismissal of the significance of the beginning with an invocation of gravity, and the counterpoint from Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin’s singularity theorem, are knit together in readable prose.

Encouragement for Curiosity

When it comes to the possibility of life forming itself naturally, again Coody gives an informative and insightful overview. Although, like the rest of us, he has his own convictions, he is willing to acknowledge the tension surrounding differing conclusions among those seeking to evaluate the evidence. He encourages the reader to persist in seeking answers: “Honest people of any faith or no faith should be interested in the truth. ” (p. 164)

The final section provides an enlightening discussion of free will. Coody captures the major issues: “Is free will an illusion created by the brain? In reality do we have any more free will than our computer?….Is the mind the same as the brain or is the mind something spiritual?” (p. 180)

Delving into the implications of materialistic determinism, and even quantum uncertainty, Coody provides a fresh look at the subject. In an illustration that is beguilingly simple, he borrows from the classic fairy tale of Pinocchio. His summary cuts deeply into one of the major shortcomings of materialist thinking: “On their view of the world, there was never any difference between the wooden Pinocchio and the human Pinocchio. Both were simply animated, soulless, material objects.” (p. 191)

Readers of almost any background will find much here that informs, provokes deeper reflection, and provides refreshing and novel illustrations relevant to the discussion of some of life’s most enduring questions

Getting fraud down to a science? III

 

Getting fraud down to a Science?II

 Data Can Appear in Science Journals — Out of Thin Air

Evolution News

Recently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.”

But That Wasn’t the Big Surprise

The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors:

In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values and dragged the selected cells down or up, depending on the case. The program then filled in the blanks. If the new numbers turned negative, Heshmati replaced them with the last positive value Excel had spit out. “No data? No problem!” …

But it got worse. Heshmati’s data, which the student convinced him to share, showed that in several instances where there were no observations to use for the autofill operation, the professor had taken the values from an adjacent country in the spreadsheet. New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom.

 UNDISCLOSED TINKERING IN EXCEL BEHIND ECONOMICS PAPER,” RETRACTION WATCH, FEBRUARY 5, 2024

“It’s Pretty Egregious”

While many researchers decried the results, University of Copenhagen econometrician Søren Johansen said something worth pondering: “The reason it’s cheating isn’t that he’s done it, but that he hasn’t written it down,” adding, “It’s pretty egregious.”

Pomona College business prof Gary Smith weighed in at Retraction Watch, explaining how blanks can come to seem like information in statistical papers.

Imputation (the technique the authors were using), he says, is not always unfair: “If we are measuring the population of an area and are missing data for 2011, it is reasonable to fit a trend line and, unless there has been substantial immigration or emigration, use the predicted value for 2011. Using stock returns for 2010 and 2012 to impute a stock return for 2011 is not reasonable.” In other words, whether imputation is unfair depends on whether anything was likely to have happened in the period for which data is missing that would change the results. 

Another Story

But, he says, the way the authors of the controversial paper were using the technique was another story:

The most extreme cases are where a country has no data for a given variable. The authors’ solution was to copy and paste data for another country. Iceland has no MKTcap data, so all 29 years of data for Japan were pasted into the Iceland cells. Similarly, the ENVpol (environmental policy stringency) data for Greece (with six years imputed) were pasted into Iceland’s cells and the ENVpol data for Netherlands (with 2013-2018 imputed) were pasted into New Zealand’s cells. The WASTE (municipal waste per capita) data for Belgium (with 1991-1994 and 2018 imputed) were pasted into Canada. The United Kingdom’s R&Dpers (R&D personnel) data were pasted into the United States (though the 10.417 entry for the United Kingdom in 1990 was inexplicably changed to 9.900 for the United States).

The copy-and-pasted countries were usually adjacent in the alphabetical list (Belgium and Canada, Greece and Iceland, Netherlands and New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States), but there is no reason an alphabetical sorting gives the most reasonable candidates for copying and pasting. Even more troubling is the pasting of Japan’s MKTcap data into Iceland and the simultaneous pasting of Greece’s ENVpol data into Iceland. Iceland and Japan are not adjacent alphabetically, suggesting this match was chosen to bolster the desired results. 

GARY SMITH, “HOW (NOT) TO DEAL WITH MISSING DATA: AN ECONOMIST’S TAKE ON A CONTROVERSIAL STUDY, RETRACTION WATCH, FEBRUARY 21, 2024

He concludes, “There is no justification for a paper not stating that some data were imputed and describing how the imputation was done.”

What Counts as Science

Perhaps Elsevier, the journal publishers, agree with his view. Retraction Watch announced that Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, would retract the paper:

As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.” …

Elsevier, in whose Journal of Cleaner Production the study appeared, moved quickly on the new information. A spokesperson for the publisher told us yesterday: “We have investigated the paper and can confirm that it will be retracted.” 

“EXCLUSIVE: ELSEVIER TO RETRACT PAPER BY ECONOMIST WHO FAILED TO DISCLOSE DATA TINKERING,” RETRACTION WATCH, FEBRUARY 22, 2024

If Elsevier doesn’t end up retracting the paper, that will certainly say something about what counts as science today.

Note: As noted above, the first author of the paper, Almas Heshmati, was the one originally interviewed by the student. The second author, Mike Tsionas, died recently.

"Settled Science" vs. Actual science.

Stifling Opposition Is the Real “Anti-Science”

Wesley J Smith 

The advancement of science is one of mankind’s greatest triumphs. And who could be against it? Deploying the raw power of rational analysis, science exponentially increases our understanding of the natural world and leads to wonderous applications to improve the human condition.

But these days, science has become something of a divisive concept. It’s not that most people reject the scientific method or science’s many achievements. Rather, because some in the scientific establishment co-opt the term “science” as a means of exerting control over policy or to further favored ideological agendas, trust in the scientific sector is deflating.

You know the types. They can be seen regularly on cable TV claiming righteously that “the science is settled” about the rightness of their opinions — for example, the medical propriety of “affirming” gender confusion in children with puberty blockers. Then, they deploy the pejorative “anti-science” against those who disagree to stifle other perspectives.

The Antithesis of Science

But shutting critics up is the antithesis of science, properly understood. Indeed, stifling opposition is the real “anti-science” because it betrays the fundamental precepts of the scientific method, an approach to learning that requires continual argumentation, (sometimes bitter) disagreements, and the never-ending willingness to challenge accepted orthodoxies. In this sense, “the science” is never “settled” but always open to revised understandings. Otherwise, science mutates into dogma, which suppresses the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, sometimes that is the point.

Examples of once-unquestioned “truths” overturned by subsequent discoveries are legion. Here’s a recent example. Biologists used to believe that the human appendix was a useless vestigial organ. But because science is dynamic, this once uncontroversial perspective was challenged. And what do you know? “Science” has now discovered at least two valuable purposes for the appendix: it supports the body’s immune system and serves as a “bank” of sorts for storing beneficial gut bacteria.

Now, imagine if the scientists who worked to attain a better understanding of the appendix had been prevented from exploring that subject because the “scientific consensus” had determined previously that the organ had no beneficial purpose. What if the self-appointed guardians of perceived medical wisdom had dissuaded researchers from pursuing their investigations for fear of losing university tenure, being scorned by colleagues, or having research funding blocked? Valuable knowledge would have been lost. New medical approaches for treating an infected appendix would never be developed. The mistaken scientific understanding would have remained, yes, “settled.”

The Costs of “Settled Science”

Alas, these days the science establishment too often engages in just such censorship when it involves controversial scientific issues. We saw that on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic. When three noted epidemiologists (pictured above) questioned the wisdom of societal shutdowns and keeping children out of school, in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), rather than engage its content — as would have been the proper scientific approach — the public health establishment instead attempted to destroy the messengers. For example, then-National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins slandered the authors as “fringe,” and Anthony Fauci worked to undermine the GBD in the media. One of the authors, Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, even found himself scorned by his own academic community for contesting the “settled science.”

Funny that. In the end, the GBD proved to have the better argument, illustrating the terrible harm that can be caused by stifling the scientific method and suppressing dissenting views.

Or consider the hot-button topic of evolution. For decades public spokespersons for the scientific establishment have insisted that the contemporary theory of evolution is unchallengeable. Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins even went so far as to claim that “if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” Talk about chilling open scientific inquiry!

Yet, in 2016, a group of leading evolutionary and cell biologists convened a conference at the Royal Society in London. Many scientists who attended openly called for a new theory of evolution because of their increasing doubts about the supposed creative power of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection. Are all these scientists “ignorant, stupid or insane”? Of course not. They are simply “doing science.”

The same vituperative anti-science approach to stifling critics was pursued by the scientific establishment during the embryonic stem cell debate between 2001 and 2008. After President George W. Bush funded embryonic stem cell research but also placed modest federal funding limitations on the experiments, he and supporters of his policy were accused of imposing their religious beliefs against “the gold standard” of regenerative medicine that could soon allow disabled people to throw away their wheelchairs. Scientific arguments that adult stem cells offered the better hope of developing treatments for a wide array of medical conditions were similarly attacked.

The Proof Is in the Pudding

More than twenty years later, what do we see? Embryonic stem cell research was mostly hype. There is not one FDA-approved treatment using embryonic stem cells. Meanwhile, adult stem cells are used to treat a wide array of pathologies. In other words, despite all the name-calling and screeching about interference with the scientific consensus, the heterodox theorists were right.

That isn’t always true, of course. Established views frequently prove correct when challenged. But that isn’t the point. What matters is that for science to be “science,” perceived truths — no matter how seemingly settled — must always be subject to rethinking. The defense of generally accepted views should be based on evidence, not personal denigration of the challengers.

Alas, they never learn. Whether the scientific issue involves climate change, the safety of vaccines, how best to care for children with gender dysphoria, or the alleged scientific support in favor of Darwinian evolution, etc., the scientific establishment continues to brand those who contest their opinions (as a column in Scientific American put it recently) “anti-science” for rejecting “mainstream scientific views.”

That’s Baloney

Stifling the messy and contentious process required for scientific knowledge to advance undermines science. Yes, that means charlatans and frauds may, at times, successfully beguile the ignorant. But just like the most efficacious answer to bad speech is good speech, the way to overcome bad science is for good science to demonstrate its veracity. Attempts to short-circuit that contentious process betray the very purposes science is supposed to serve.

Antimatter is rebellious?

 

Getting fraud down to a science?

 

The Thorium dream dies hard?

 

The fall of the empire of the gene?

 

What could go wrong? II