Religion, Faith, and Spirituality : Race Realism

The easiest way for these race realists to back up their claims would be to use the data from the 1 million plus Human genomes that have been sequenced. The reason they don't is because the evidence isn't there.

This blog post explains why it's extremely unlikely that differences in IQ between people from different geographical locations are genetic https://adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/the-armadillo-gauge/

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There have been some studies which have been published, which suggests that there could be a racial difference. Not many studies, given that this is an extremely controversial area of inquiry and not many scientists are willing to risk that their studies will yield politically inconvenient results and cause them to lose their livelihoods and be blackballed in academia like Chris Brand and James Watson. I'm sure that you'll agree that the Nobel Prize winning James Watson is not a 'fake scientist' just because his beliefs are at odds with those of the majority of the scientific community.

And I'm not saying that I believe in racial differences in IQ, simply that it seems that your side of the debate is not willing to prove your theory experimentally and is even trying to shut down any attempts to resolve the question with experimental data. Most unscientific.

But you are skirting my point - why is it that your theory is permitted to stand without any actual data, when science works on the basis that theory is usually not sufficient to consider the matter scientifically settled? So you could have a really coherent argument to support your beliefs, but usually this would still be required to be corroborated with data before the matter can be considered to be established scientific fact. Why is this area of inquiry the singular exception to the rule that evidence is required to bolster the theoretical framework?

Would it get some wind for the sailboat? Would it get the railroad for these workers?

My 'theory' is the null hypothesis, there's no difference in the genetic factors that contribute to IQ between geographical populations. It's up to the race realist to confirm the hypothesis that there is a difference and so far they have failed miserably.

You're skirting the point that the Human geneticist makes in his blog post, why is that?

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

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My 'theory' is the null hypothesis, there's no difference in the genetic factors that contribute to IQ between geographical populations. It's up to the race realist to confirm the hypothesis that there is a difference and so far they have failed miserably.

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There have been experiments which have yielded differences between the races. You state that these experiments fail to fully control for environmental factors - fair enough, so why can't an experiment be designed that mitigates environmental factors? Otherwise you are arguing away the extant data, rather than providing data which debunks the existing experimental data. Of course it's good when you have a robust rebuttal to the findings of a certain experiment; but wouldn't marrying that with experimental data of your own be even better?

From what you call 'non race realists' there seems to be no interest in producing experimental data which bolsters their rebuttals to existing studies. What we can say is that there are legitimate reasons to want the matter to be settled.

Not merely the fact that advancing the state of scientific knowledge is always a worthy endeavour. The matter needs to be settled so that we can ascertain whether attempts to level the playing field between races are ultimately futile, or whether we should continue to pursue such policies.

Your approach seems more akin to a spirited defence of scientific orthodoxy than dispassionate adherence to the 'null hypothesis'.

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You're skirting the point that the Human geneticist makes in his blog post, why is that?

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I haven't made it my business to dismiss the opinions and insight of people who are more qualified than myself. I haven't committed to either side of the debate on whether or not some racial or ethnic groups are (on average) intellectually superior to others. What I'm asking is why this branch of scientific endeavour is not expected to be bolstered by experimental findings. It doesn't seem as though the scientific community is taking a morally neutral approach to this issue; it seems as though the whole matter is deemed to be too taboo to 'risk' conducting an experiment which attempts to control for environmental factors.


Would it get some wind for the sailboat? Would it get the railroad for these workers?

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There have been experiments which have yielded differences between the races

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You obviously missed the 'genetic factors' part of the sentence.

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Your avoidance of my points (once again) is noted.

Would it get some wind for the sailboat? Would it get the railroad for these workers?

You haven't made any coherent points, designing the kind of experiments you propose is probably impossible and pointless given the amount of data we have on the Human genome. The blog post author explains extremely well why it's very unlikely that Human populations have diverged enough to show a measurable difference in IQ.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

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The blog post author explains extremely well why it's very unlikely that Human populations have diverged enough to show a measurable difference in IQ.

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No he doesn't.
Brushing aside the blogger's editorializing invective, his argument reduces to such a skimpy appeal to ignorance that it's surprising you'd stake your position on it.

From the blog in question:

They think the cultural and technological differences among human societies are primarily due to genetics.

Straw man (and the word "primarily" is debatable). The question under direct investigation is latent cognitive abilities, not the proxy of technological tangents. (see "Guns, Germs and Steel" for that answer.)

Blogger follows this with reams of empty "racist!" name-calling which seems intent on narrowing the contest to Blacks versus White while ignoring that whites are routinely found to perform worse in IQ scores compared to Asians: these alleged 'racist' researchers, presumably thought white, must enjoy ranking whites in second place, one must suppose?
His other presented points do not discount the influence of distinct environmental pressures.


Genetic differences among populations are not absolute, but statistical averages. For example, a variant of a gene occurs in 20% of Peruvians and 40% of Nigerians.

Irrelevant. Those numbers would nonetheless serve as indicators of tendency. There's no need to argue for absolutes.


There is no such thing as a gene for a complex behavioral habit like altruism or creativity. Such aptitudes emerge from a medley of genetic and environmental factors.
we do not see such differences in genes underlying mental traits.

That claim is not only premature, it's already demonstrated false:

Creative ability and social attachment have both been linked to the AVPR1A gene ["Genetic Basis Of Musical Aptitude: Neurobiology Of Musicality Related To Intrinsic Attachment Behavior", Liisa T. Ukkola et al, 2009].
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005534

This^ study WAS heavily controlled for a host of social factors over its 12 years of observation. Performance by ethnicity wasn't the focus of this particular study, however. All subjects were Finnish (a relatively homogenous country); feel free to repeat the study on different ethnic groups for contrast.

Another study on the subject found similar and additional linkages:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article%3Fid%3D10.1371/journal.pone.0148679


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886995001581
Racial and ethnic differences in intelligence in the United States on the Differential Ability Scale [Richard Lynn, 1995]
This study comparing IQ test results of American students found "mean IQs are highest among the Asians and decline successively among whites, Hispanics and blacks."
Effect size of approximately one standard deviation (about 15 IQ points) between Whites and Blacks has been replicated more than once elsewhere (Dreger & Miller, 1960, 1968; Jensen, 1973; Loehlin, Lindzey, & Spuhler, 1975; Nichols, 1987; Shuey, 1966; Tyler, 1965; Vernon, 1979).

Differences in verbal and math intelligence could conceivably be explained away by social factors but it's difficult to see how one would make a similar case for the differences in non-verbal reasoning and spatial ability.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40064476?origin=JSTOR-pdf
The Totality of Available Evidence Shows the Race IQ Gap Still Remain

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In a previous study (Rushton & Jensen, 2005), we examined 10 categories of technical research and concluded that the mean Black- White IQ difference in the United States is about 80% heritable. We reviewed evidence that
(a) the distribution of IQ scores around the world shows averages of 106 for East Asians, 100 for Whites, 85 for U.S. Blacks, and 70 for sub-Saharan Africans;
(b) race differences are most pronounced on the more g-loaded subtests (g being the general factor of mental ability);
race differences are most pronounced on the subtests whose scores show the most heritability;
and (d) racial differences in brain size parallel the IQ differences. We also reviewed corroborating studies of (e) racial admixture, (f) trans-racial adoption, (g) regression to different racial means, (h) 60 related life-history traits, (i) human origins, and (j) the inadequacy of environmental explanations of the racial IQ difference.

Dickens and Flynn (2006) challenge our hypothesis. They claim that "no one can really trace the Black-White IQ gap in the United States back to its origins" (p. 913) and that in the United States, Blacks have gained "4 to 7 IQ points on non-Hispanic Whites between 1972 and 2002" (p. 913). But to maintain that "no one can really trace the gap back to its origins," Dickens and Flynn had to sidestep our citation of Shuey's (1966) review of the literature, which shows that Black-White IQ differences in the United States have remained at 15 to 18 points, or 1.1 standard deviations, for nearly a century.

Even the tests Dickens and Flynn did analyze do not support their conclusion. The alleged gain of 4 to 7 points is from a "projected" trend line based on a small IQ rise per year multiplied by more years than are in the data using unclear procedure

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Another point of interest is that the scores for American ethnic Orientals correspond to scores of Oriental peoples worldwide (Vernon, 1982; Lynn, 1987; Flynn, 1991), contrary to an expectation of variance if cultural influence were to blame. (Chinese 'tiger moms', maybe? Nope. The oriental group cited includes Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China and South Korea.)


Thats also to be expected, because the main thing driving natural selection on our brains is other people. The human drama of gossip, romance, revenge, and fraternity doesnt change whether you are a tropical hunter-gatherer or a farmer on a frigid plain.

It's correct that other group members constitute part of environment for social species.
It's overstating the point to dismiss everything else as secondary or marginal.
Resource scarcity in unfamiliar environments would increase inter-tribal competition, for instance, perhaps requiring mentally creative solutions. Competition variables may therefore be amplified by inhospitable terrain or climate.


But its not, because the default assumption in evolution should be that traits do not change.

Unless acted upon by environmental pressures. This is actually an argument for why African ethnicities may not have progressed intellectually, having remained in familiar circumstances on the African continent as opposed to migrating populations forced to solve-or-die when met with novel survival challenges of a new environment. (Novelty is one of the dimensions of creative intelligence.)


Blogger's subsequent fussing with numbers proceeds from his own admitted baseless guesswork. It's laughably sophomoric that he imagines intelligence scales linearly with vocabulary retention in contending that humans must be "20,000 times more intelligent than an armadillo" given that animal's difficulty in learning a single vocal command. The non-linearity of human vocabulary acquisition (as evidenced in infant studies) is exactly why we needn't anticipate big genetic discrepancies to account for big disparities in mental performance: a minor tweak of a single gene (examples above) would be sufficient to influence cortical features or facility at cross-domain processing (the latter apparently playing a role in creativity).

Incidentally, it's puzzling that a professed "evolutionary biologist" would resort to such an apples-oranges comparison, as if armadillos might have any evolutionary reason to be specialized for linguistics learning in absence of those selection pressures. One might as easily submit that humans are 'olfactory-stupid' compared to many animals, so why should spoken language be regarded as the measure of 'vocabulary' across species except for convenience of human perspective? e.g., How large is a dog's olfactory vocabulary compared to its knowledge on average of 150 words?


Meanwhile, your appeal to the observation that there's more genetic variability within ethnic groups than between groups [Vernon, 1979] is a classic example of How To Lie With Statistics (1959). The question of ethnic difference in cognitive performance is not concerned with general "genetic diversity" because there's no a priori reason to assume that gene variants responsible for intelligence are uniformly distributed rather than being exceptional. So who cares if African groups have "greater genetic diversity" regarding the other 99/100 genes if it happens they're found to exhibit little diversity in those few genes of critical interest to augmenting neurocognitive function? (which has yet to be determined, to be clear.)


Biological denialists are ideologues who, rather than rejecting biological determinism, evidently believe that admitting biological differences between groups would justify prejudiced social policies, or are otherwise fearful that such an admission would afford them no traction against racial or gender biases. They'd rather silence all inquiry into the subject and use protest buzzwords to censor anyone reporting it. This is where they appeal to failing social constructionist theories


NEWS: Babies are racist bigots!

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Why Infants Pay Attention to People Like Them
Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times (Oct 17 2016)

As anyone whos tried to befriend a baby knows, the very young are a tough crowd. (snip)

New research suggests that babies are highly selective discriminating even in whom they will pay attention to. And even before their first birthdays, this research shows, babies distinguish between people like me and all others.

For those of us who like to think that prejudice is a taint that comes with age, this may be disappointing news. But a new study, published Monday in the journal PNAS, offers a fresh perspective on babies remarkable ability to distinguish between in-group members (people like me) and out-group members (others) at such a young age.

Babies are all about learning new stuff, the new research concludes. And they wont waste a minute paying attention to someone they deem unlikely to deliver the goods. ()

[His/]her inborn drive for information makes her a discriminating judge of whos worth listening to, said the researchers. This heightened valuation of same-group members may have its origins in infancy, the origin of this preference may be a consequence of infants drive to seek information from the optimal informant."

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-infants-language-learn-20161017-snap-story.html

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http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/10/12/1603261113.abstract
Humans preference for others who share our group membership is well documented, and this heightened valuation of in-group members seems to be rooted in early development. Before 12 mo of age, infants already show behavioral preferences for others who evidence cues to same-group membership such as race or native language, yet the function of this selectivity remains unclear. We examine one of these social biases [read: they studied the less contentious one because politics], the preference for native speakers, and propose that this preference may result from infants motivation to obtain information and the expectation that interactions with native speakers will provide better opportunities for learning. To investigate this hypothesis, we measured EEG theta activity, a neural rhythm shown to index active and selective preparation for encoding information in adults. In study 1, we established that 11-mo-old infants exhibit an increase in theta activation in situations when they can expect to receive information. We then used this neural measure of anticipatory theta activity to explore the expectations of 11-mo-olds when facing social partners who either speak the infants native language or a foreign tongue (study 2). A larger increase in theta oscillations was observed when infants could expect to receive information from the native speaker, indicating that infants were preparing to learn information from the native speaker to a greater extent than from the foreign speaker. While previous research has demonstrated that infants prefer to interact with knowledgeable others, the current experiments provide evidence that such an information-seeking motive may also underpin infants demonstrated preference for native speakers.


It's amusing that social constructionists are so consistently wrong about everything. They reject evolutionary psychology by absurdly imagining that evolution stops at the neck.

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Genetic differences among populations are not absolute, but statistical averages. For example, a variant of a gene occurs in 20% of Peruvians and 40% of Nigerians.

Irrelevant. Those numbers would nonetheless serve as indicators of tendency. There's no need to argue for absolutes.

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Of course it's relevant. It dramatically limits application of such information. And what kind of "tendency" do you think it indicates? If you mean in a statistical sense then you're not saying anything more than the original statement. If you mean for an individual, then it's nigh useless; if the gene combination is present then the individual will have one tendency and with it absent perhaps another, but what won't be known is the existence of the combination in the particular individual, at least not from race/ethnicity.

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There is no such thing as a gene for a complex behavioral habit like altruism or creativity. Such aptitudes emerge from a medley of genetic and environmental factors.
we do not see such differences in genes underlying mental traits.

That claim is not only premature, it's already demonstrated false:

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"The results suggest that the neurobiology of music perception and production is likely to be related to the pathways affecting intrinsic attachment behavior" does not demonstrate the above statement false. It is some evidence suggesting that there is an association of certain genes and "musical creativity".

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It's amusing that social constructionists are so consistently wrong about everything.

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What's amusing is those who are so ardent to conflate the blunt and misleading categories of race as proxy for the presence of certain genes and their statistically associated traits.

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They reject evolutionary psychology by absurdly imagining that evolution stops at the neck.

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This is just tendentious yap; nobody is discounting the role of genetics. How everything comes together to make the stew is of course now and will continue to be the subject of intense study and debate.

And what studies on genetics and traits are being "silenced"?

That's an awful lot of irrelevant cut and paste to try and answer a very simple question. The author of the blog points out the short space of time that Human geographical populations have diverged and you do absolutely nothing to explain how a trait as complex as intelligence could have evolved so differently so quickly and that these genotypes are associated with different geographical populations.

And then you say this -That claim is not only premature, it's already demonstrated false: WRT to the bloggers point that complex Human behaviours aren't determined by single genes. Do you seriously think that's what the study you cited showed? Because it really doesn't, Arginine vasopressin receptors have important functions, so do many other receptors and signalling molecules. You're being slightly premature, especially as this study was done in one very small geographical population. Are you sure you want to extrapolate your assertion from that? The authors certainly don't, they even say The dopaminergic and serotoninergic system, and related genes, have been shown to influence cognitive and motor functions in human and animal studies That's multiple genes, in case you can't count.

The rest of it is just the usual sophistry and off topic b/s, neither the blogger or me are denying that IQ and other complex Human behaviour doesn't have a strong hereditary component (the study you cited has a high hereditary component but its's not 100%). But the key points are.

1. No study on 'race' and IQ has properly controlled for environment, so the Null hypothesis still stands.
2. Comparison of the 1 million plus Human genomes that have been sequenced has shown no differences between geographical groups beyond simple, single gene traits like Lactase persistence.

I'm always sceptical of just so evolutionary psychology stories unless they have hard molecular evidence to back them up, the study you cited is interesting but it doesn't back up you farcial claim that complex Human behaviour is controlled by a single gene and it certainly says nothing about it's segregation in the wider Human population.


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Watson wasn't blackballed, and the criticism he faced wasn't because of any of his studies, it was for comments he made in an interview. And Brand made all kinds of crazy talk.

In any case, "beliefs" scientific studies.

Watson was blackballed, to the extent where he resorted to selling his Nobel Prize. And it was because it was considered heresy in science not to subscribe unquestioningly to the notion that the average IQ is consistent across all racial and ethnic groups, not to mention the inane notion that it's impossible to measure intelligence in any meaningful sense because all tests are 'culturally biased'.

Making controversial comments should not cause an academic to lose their livelihood. Especially not a scientist, given that science is not supposed to be beholden to a particular political worldview and is not only supposed to publish studies which corroborate that.

Would it get some wind for the sailboat? Would it get the railroad for these workers?

Nope, he wasn't "blackballed". People not wanting to host his lectures is not "blackballing" They don't want to host yours either.

In 2014, he decided to auction off his Nobel prize medal in view of his diminished income after the 2007 incident and to use part of the funds raised by the sale to support scientific research. a mea culpa stunt. And it was returned to him.


He was just saying things the felt - similar to the way you guys do it.

His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.

Watson has repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003

While speaking at a conference in 2000, Watson had suggested a link between skin color and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English Patient."

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."

The entire concept of using the very unreliable indicator of anything other than what you can already see shows, skin color, shows that he's picked up something, along with his other public boneheaded statements.

He's kind of a smart total idiot.


http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000108/thread/264797435?d=264985250#264985250
http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000108/thread/265217885?d=265458030#265458030

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Nope, he wasn't "blackballed". People not wanting to host his lectures is not "blackballing"

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They didn't want to host his lectures, because a Nobel prize meant nothing if he wasn't going to keep the lecture theatre a 'safe space' and eschew controversial areas of inquiry.

Would it get some wind for the sailboat? Would it get the railroad for these workers?

He shouldn't have been such a virtue-signalin' brownie-loving SJW cuck. He should have suicided in front of those blackballers like any true liberal would.







Nope, he wasn't "blackballed". People not wanting to host his lectures is not "blackballing" They don't want to host yours either.

In 2014, he decided to auction off his Nobel prize medal in view of his diminished income after the 2007 incident and to use part of the funds raised by the sale to support scientific research. a mea culpa stunt. And it was returned to him.


He was just saying things the felt - similar to the way you guys do it.

His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.

Watson has repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003

While speaking at a conference in 2000, Watson had suggested a link between skin color and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English Patient."

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."

The entire concept of using the very unreliable indicator of anything other than what you can already see shows, skin color, shows that he's picked up something, along with his other public boneheaded statements.

He's kind of a smart total idiot.


http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000108/thread/264797435?d=264985250#264985250
http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000108/thread/265217885?d=265458030#265458030

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My 'theory' is the null hypothesis, there's no difference in the genetic factors that contribute to IQ between geographical populations. It's up to the race realist to confirm the hypothesis that there is a difference and so far they have failed miserably.

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One hallmark of a good scientist is curiosity. You have NONE. You are the least curious person in this thread. Even if we accepted your outlandish idea that genes must be responsible for every aspect of our biology below the neck and none of it above by default, that still would not exonerate your lack of curiosity or your assertion of confidence in your "theory", which by the way is fringe. You're not even familiar with the subject enough to know your opponent's arguments or that the debate is generally over the DEGREE of heritability. It's not up to anyone to do anything, but don't act like you'd greenlight an investigation into race and intelligence and risk an unpalatable result for no good reason. Best to keep us in the dark. But you're not going to convince a single person who doesn't already worship at the alter of secular humanism. Hate to break it to you but equality doesn't exist anywhere in nature.

Having a quick scan through these few posts, I think you should read Guns, Germs and Steel. Very good book.

I doubt Ruth would agree that genes control everything below the neck - height is influenced by genetics, but if a child is malnourished his genes won't make him grow. Presumably you do agree that environment can influence intelligence, since you suggest finding somewhere where people of different races share a similar environment. Surely you acknowledge how difficult it would be to control for environment in these kind of investigations.

Anyway, Ruth asked me to comment on the null hypothesis and the scientific method. I'm not sure you don't understand it because you haven't really commented on what she's said. "No relationship" is the null hypothesis here, just as "no relationship" between the stars at the moment of our birth and our personality would be the null hypothesis when talking about astrology. Surely you can see how foolish it would be for someone to take the attitude "star signs predict the future - prove me wrong."

I wasn't really serious but it was the misunderstanding of my point about the Null hypothesis and them thinking this = lazy science. You're spot on about genes and environment, it's not an either/or answer and as far as I know genes are responsible for a pretty high percentage of your IQ, that's not the argument though and that's what they don't seem to understand.

I think we've talked about Jared Diamond before, his books really are worth reading.

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My Mum's a teacher of year 1 or 2 (can't remember) and tells me there's a huge difference in children who went to pre-school and those who didn't. I mean, when you think of everything middle class parents do to support their child's education - extra tuition, museum trips etc - and see how that's reflected in exam results it's difficult to deny the influence on environment on intelligence. I know nothing about how much is genes and how much environment, but it seems intuitive to me that environment plays a big part.

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Why is this area of inquiry the singular exception to the rule that evidence is required to bolster the theoretical framework?

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This is more common than you think, in every area of biology. For instance, there's never been a study where one group of people eat genetically modified soybeans, and another group eats regular soybeans, and then they have their health markers compared. In fact, scientists claim this would be "unethical". You can't even imagine how they worked this one out. You see, the GMOs are thought to be a potentially harmful intervention. So we can't study them, and we have to assume they're not harmful. What? Then we sell them as equivalent to the public at large. What a twisted arrangement they worked out for themselves. How many people are even aware that there's never been a study? How many people have instead heard that there's a "mountain of evidence" proving their safety?

Every scientific authority has an entire board for ethics, and it's a literal example of anti-science, where science is considered from the standpoint of sociological impact. Can't study race because it might hurt people's feelings. That's the obvious one. But it's everywhere even if it's just a little spin. Sure we probably all agree Dr Mengele shouldn't secretly be pumping massive amounts of fluoride in our water and measuring docility. In fact ethics boards don't even prevent that kind of thing, publicly, only privately. There's all sorts of Tuskegee type experimentation. But it also goes the other way. We also don't want junk epidemiological research with pal review. That's how you get 100 different diet books with 100 conflicting sets of facts and a nation of obese people.

http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/

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even the better epidemiologists in the world consider this stuff closer to a pseudoscience than a real science. I used as a case study the researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Walter Willett, who runs the Nurses Health Study. In doing so, I wanted to point out one of the main reasons why nutritionists and public health authorities have gone off the rails in their advice about what constitutes a healthy diet. The article itself pointed out that every time in the past that these researchers had claimed that an association observed in their observational trials was a causal relationship, and that causal relationship had then been tested in experiment, the experiment had failed to confirm the causal interpretation i.e., the folks from Harvard got it wrong. Not most times, but every time. No exception. Their batting average circa 2007, at least, was .000.

Now its these very same Harvard researchers Walter Willett and his colleagues who have authored this new article claiming that red meat and processed meat consumption is deadly; that eating it regularly raises our risk of dying prematurely and contracting a host of chronic diseases. Zoe Harcombe has done a wonderful job dissecting the paper at her site. I want to talk about the bigger picture (in a less concise way).

This is an issue about science itself and the quality of research done in nutrition. Those of you who have read Good Calories, Bad Calories (The Diet Delusion in the UK) know that in the epilogue I make a point to say that I never used the word scientist to describe the people doing nutrition and obesity research, except in very rare and specific cases. Simply put, I dont believe these people do science as it needs to be done; it would not be recognized as science by scientists in any functioning discipline.

Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. Its not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis force x causes observation y and then you do your best to prove that its wrong. If you cant, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis was right. Peter Medawar, the Nobel Laureate immunologist, described this proving-its-wrong step as the the critical or rectifying episode in scientific reasoning. Heres Karl Popper saying the same thing: The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them. The bold conjectures, the hypotheses, making the observations that lead to your conjectures thats the easy part. The critical or rectifying episode, which is to say, the ingenious and severe attempts to refute your conjectures, is the hard part. Anyone can make a bold conjecture. (Heres one: space aliens cause heart disease.) Making the observations and crafting them into a hypothesis is easy. Testing them ingeniously and severely to see if theyre right is the rest of the job say 99 percent of the job of doing science, of being a scientist.

The problem with observational studies like those run by Willett and his colleagues is that they do none of this. Thats why its so frustrating. The hard part of science is left out and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should all change our diets accordingly.

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So much of what scientific authorities say is based on NOTHING, and it doesn't help their cause when they start helming and hawing about not being taken for granted.

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The reason they don't is because the evidence isn't there.

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Is this a chicken and egg joke?

I know you're the village idiot but even you could have read the preceding sentence

The easiest way for these race realists to back up their claims would be to use the data from the 1 million plus Human genomes that have been sequenced.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Honestly, posters like him just scare me. He exhibits no sign of even the most basic human warmth or decency. He's just straight-up evil. There's no other word for it. Winning an argument is a secondary concern for him. And he mainly seems to get off on hurting people. It's actually kind of creepy.

I would be worried if someone as dumb and obnoxious as him didn't dislike me

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

it's almost as if certain people deem themselves extra super special as an excuse to maintain power over others.






Stephen