Humans are still evolving, scientists find

Just bizarre.

Sure, perhaps the natural selection isn’t running away from lions any more and the sexual selection might be taking place at the point of deciding who to be monogamous with but the idea that neither are still happening seems most odd.

Once only has to look at the lack of chins among Guards officers to note that something has indeed been going on.

I try to claim that I was friends with the genius Richard Feynman. He came to our show a few times and was very complimentary, and I had dinner with him a couple times, and we chatted on the phone several times. I’d call him to get quick tutoring on physics so I could pretend to read his books.

No matter how much I want to brag, it’s overstating it to call him a friend. I would never have called him to help me move a couch. I did, however, call him once to ask how we could score some liquid nitrogen for a Letterman spot we wanted to do. He was the only physicist I knew at the time. He explained patiently that he didn’t know. He was a theoretical physicist and I needed a hands-on guy, but he’d try to find one for me.

About a half-hour later a physics teacher from a community college in Brooklyn called me and said, “I don’t know what kind of practical joke this is, but a Nobel Prize-winning scientist just called me here at the community college, gave me this number, and told me to call Penn of Penn & Teller to help with a Letterman appearance.”

It’s a very politically correct and very bad fail:

The point is that there are also group differences, not in attractiveness (as Kanazawa claims), but in cultural messages about what is and is not attractive. Standards of beauty, like most other beliefs, are socialized and change not only from place to place but also over time.  In both the United States and England, (where Kanazawa lives and works), standards of beauty are essentially “White” standards, because whites comprise the majority of the population and have disproportional control over both media and fashion. And while it is not just White respondents who are socialized this way (internalized racism has been well documented), it is certainly the case that White Americans and Europeans (who are less likely to have received more positive messages about Black beauty) would show the strongest anti-Black bias.

As long as this is understood and framed accordingly, there is no problem with the data Kanazawa reports.  What they show is that because Black faces and bodies don’t fit mainstream White standards of physical attractiveness, both respondents and interviewers show an anti-Black bias.

This does not explain the observed facts. That people consider (or those questioned consider) black/African females to be less attractive and black/African males to be more attractive.

“Peeps don’t like blacks” or “Whitey Power!” or even ” people are acculturated to white standards of attractiveness and thus think darkies are ugly” don’t manage to explain that fact. And as we are at least attempting to talk about science a theory that doesn’t explain all the facts is wrong. Plain, flat out, wrong.

However “correct” it might be.

Satoshi Kanazawa’s racist nonsense should not be tolerated

The psychologist’s latest article asks ‘why black women are less attractive’. What will Psychology Today and the LSE do about it?

Well, go have a look at what he actually said (using Google cache).

As I commented at The G:

Note the very large difference between what The G says he said, he asks “why are black women less attractive”? and what he actually asks “this data says that black women are considered less attractive. Why?”

That second is an entirely valid scientific question. After all, the proper study of man is mankind. So if we’ve this objective fact about how people perceive the looks of those from different racial (uggh, horrible word, genetic then) backgrounds, yes, wouldn’t it be interesting to know the answer? His may or may not be the correct one but it seems a reasonable one.

Update: worth recalling that this is all US data. So “black/African” really means “of West African descent”.

Potential cures for dozens of debilitating conditions are under threat from a European ruling that claims that making money from embryonic stem cell research is immoral, leading scientists have warned.

As one raised as a Papist I can see the logic being deployed. Good cannot come from an evil act. This was used a decade or more back to insist that British Catholics should not use the newer Rubella vaccine, for it had been created from the cells of an aborted foetus. That abortion itself was an evil act and thus good cannot come from the vaccine created out of it.

The monk who drafted this (entirely unsurprising, given Catholic moral teachings) opinion was in fact one of the history teachers at my old school.

Anyway, we can see at least elements of this in this ruling:

EU judges are considering a test case that could make it unlawful to patent applications using embryonic stem cells, or anything derived from them, on moral grounds.

Perhaps not “you may not do this” but at least “you may not profit from this” which amounts, in the end, to very much the same thing. For without profit no one will do it.

Despite the dreadfulness of the subject matter (“is it OK to kill someone in order to save others?”) there is a certain amusement in it all.

For those who insist that there are no moral concerns about embryonic stem cell research, hey, a blastocyst isn’t a person so it doesn’t matter, are exactly those who tend to argue that there are moral concerns over the use of money in the creation of blastocysts. No money should change hands for eggs or sperm for example. The Mary Warnocks of this world (purely as an example, I don’t actually know what her views are on these two subjects, just a symbol for those who would do the moral philosohpy behind the law for us).

The Royal Society said that China was now second only to the US in terms of its share of the world’s scientific research papers written in English. The UK has been pushed into third place, with Germany, Japan, France and Canada following behind.

“The scientific world is changing and new players are fast appearing. Beyond the emergence of China, we see the rise of South-East Asian, Middle Eastern, North African and other nations,” said Chris Llewellyn Smith, director of energy research at Oxford University and chair of the Royal Society’s study.

“The increase in scientific research and collaboration, which can help us to find solutions to the global challenges we now face, is very welcome.

Absolutely. Science is a public good.

That’s why we subsidise it of course: because we all benefit whoever does it an whoever does it cannot profit from having done so.

That more people are peering into test tubes in China is simply a good thing for us. Because we get to use what they find out.

This won’t stop some moron starting to talk about the growing “science gap” or some such nonsense but it remains true all the same.

Up to a point. Priya Shetty is among those to note that the Vatican is hosting an Aids conference on 28 May, but wonders whether a forthcoming update on bioethics issues in stem cell research and reproductive technology will be as “pragmatic” as its new stance on condom use.

But, umm, ethics, bioethics, are not a matter of science. They are a matter of, umm, ethics.

It was a decision point. I had to find out if the bacteria could really affect a healthy person and cause gastritis. I’d been working very hard in the previous 12 months on piglets, but I have to tell you that piglets aren’t piglets for very long. They just about grow before your eyes, so after six months I had nearly full-sized pigs in our offices and I was wrestling with them and it was chaos. And you can’t infect pigs very easily, it turns out, so that failed rather miserably.

It does help if you’re right of course.

Why does Stephen Hawking think science has overtaken philosophy?

Erm, because philosophers are still arguing about “what is truth?” as they have been for some 3,000 years that we know of while scientists have actually been able to find out the odd thing over the same time period?

You know, ‘leccie, evolution, gravity, trivial things like that?

He investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space could be done quickly and cheaply. He was right. SpaceX’s Merlin engines are beautifully engineered and powerful, but simply made. They run on highly refined kerosene that costs less than petrol. The rockets they power – in the shape of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 – are also simple. They have fewer stages (where one bit of the rocket separates from the other) than their rivals and are mostly re-usable. Thus they can put cargo into space for a fraction of the cost.

It’s that old markets thing again. Through experimentation with different methods of doing things and testing one against the other in said market we end up improving productivity. Something that government mandated monopolies rarely do.

And through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth’s orbit.

Well, yes, but that’s not the difficult bit. As has been pointed out, once you’re in orbit you’re not half way to the Moon, you’re half way to anywhere. It’s all about delta-v you see. It’s getting a complete Falcon-9 into orbit that’s the tough bit…..

* Bit surprised a few years ago to get an email from Musk asking me to call him. “So, this aluminum scandium, is this the stuff I should be using?”….”Umm, maybe, for the welding properties, but probably not. What you really want is scandium aluminide for re-entry bits but that’s another decade or more away.” “OK, well, we’ll leave that sort of research to other people…..”

First, and quite probably the last, time I’ve spoken to a billionaire.

Scientist in doesn’t understand economics shocker!

The argument in favour of tax funding for science is that science is a public good. This means that it is non rivalrous and non excludable. If Mr (sorry, Professor? Dr.?) Khan discovers anti-gravity then we can’t a) stop other people from using it nor b) does other people using it mean that we cannot.

Because science is a public good economists agree that it’s something which a pure market system won’t provide enough of: if you cannot profit from it directly, other people being able to take your results and use them for free, why would you invest in it? Thus we subsidise it from taxes.

However, this very same argument which tells us that there should be tax subsidy also tells us that it doesn’t matter which country the science is done in. If a German, a Chinee, a Portugee or an American discovers anti-gravity then we are all able to use the discovery as well. Because science is a public good.

So, because science is a public good we should subsidise it, but because science is a public good it doesn’t matter which country does it.

Now, as soon as you start saying “Ah, but what about patents”, what about things that are invented which are then protected, which people can make money out of and thus we really might want to make sure they are invented in the UK….well, when you’re talking about things which are protected, which people can make money out of, then we’re no longer talking about a public good, are we? Because this is now excludable. We’ve a patent on anti-gravity and you can only use it if you pay us.

If it’s not a public good then there’s no reason for the tax subsidy.

So, you can either argue that science should be British, because we can make money from it, which has the side effect of destroying the argument for tax subsidy, or you can say that science is a public good and should have a tax subsidy….but you cannot then argue that science must be British.

One or the other please, not both. Trying to argue both just shows that you don’t understand the science of economics: not a good thing for a scientist trying to make an economic argument.

Sir David King writes:

Today, the rest of the world pours more than $2 trillion a year into the Gulf states, which is $6m per day.

That’s $6 billion a day of course (well, it is if all we’re going to worry about is those pesky orders of magnitude).

That the Government’s former Chief Scientific Advisor is innumerate might explain some of the predicament we find ourselves in.

I am all for online debates, and all for stroppy females — one of the happiest moments of the Blair years was seeing the Women’s Institute give him the bird, and the naked panic on the old fraud’s face.

And this:

In the grip of extreme parenthood you may, of course, care about other people’s children — and indeed grandparents, maiden aunts and gay brothers-in-law — and offer lip service and a few sponsored walks to assist suffering humanity at home and abroad. But, slice it how you like, your own family remains your top priority. So even if it makes moral and economic sense for government to dock your child benefit because you’re earning 60k, close your Sure Start centre because others need it more, and refuse you IVF to produce a sibling for your child, then you will howl in majestic, mother-wolf rage. You guard the cave. It’s what you do.

There’s nothing very new about this of course. Haldane’s* laying down his life for two brothers or 8 cousins is an expression of much the same point.

We aren’t all members of a happy clappy society which regards all as equal. We really do work from self to direct family to tribe to the extended society. Which is why attempts to make us consider that wider society over our own more immediate concerns so often fail.

*Haldane’s best comment is of course:

When asked “What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?”, he replied

“I’m not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.”

I’m really rather hoping that the actual paper doesn’t say anything quite as stupid as is being reported:

Their new research argues that estimates of conventional reserves should be downgraded from 1,150bn to 1,350bn barrels to between 850bn and 900bn barrels and claims that demand may outstrip supply as early as 2014.

Demand outstripping supply? What?

“We’re not operating under that basis. This is objective analysis. We’re not sitting on any oil fields. It’s critically important that reserves have been overstated, and if you take this into account, we’re talking supply not meeting demand in 2014-2015.”

In a market there is no such thing as demand outstripping supply. There is only a mismatch between supply and demand “at a price”. So I do hope that the report itself doesn’t contain such silliness.

The abstract isn’t all that much better:

While there is certainly vast amounts of fossil fuel resources left in the ground, the volume of oil that can be commercially exploited at prices the global economy has become accustomed to is limited and will soon decline. The result is that oil may soon shift from a demand-led market to a supply constrained market.

So, anyone got access to that actual paper so that I can have a shufti?

Update: Wow, that was quick. Good, I now have the article, thank you much to JJ.

DOCTORS have uncovered the first evidence that fathers of test-tube babies may be passing on their infertility to their sons.

Genetically based problem passed on through genes. That’ll have the evolutionists perplexed, eh?

Dr Frank Drake said the phasing out of analogue transmissions from television, radio and radar was making our planet electronically invisible from outer space.

While old style signals used to spread out millions of miles into outer space, even reaching some distant stars, digital transmissions are much weaker and therefore are less easy to detect by extra-terrestrial life forms.

We’ve still sent out that bolus of signals so anyone interested can still find us by the “I Love Lucy” reruns.

And yes, of course, scatty redheads are of interest even in black and white.

Conclusions Listening to Nellie the Elephant significantly increased the proportion of lay people delivering compression rates at close to 100 per minute. Unfortunately it also increased the proportion of compressions delivered at an inadequate depth. As current resuscitation guidelines give equal emphasis to correct rate and depth, listening to Nellie the Elephant as a learning aid during CPR training should be discontinued.