Here's a short list of questions that will determine if you are a person who "follows the science."
Don't overthink this. And don't get pedantic. I know all about genetic drift and deadweight loss and the Cutter incident. But anyone with a decent sense of what science tells us should be fine agreeing with this list without insisting on a bunch of caveats.
- The theory of evolution by natural selection is correct.
- Cognitive abilities in human beings are significantly—but not entirely—controlled by biology.
- Man-made climate change is very real and very serious.
- Tax cuts do not pay for themselves.
- Astrology is nonsense. Generally harmless, but still nonsense.
- Childhood vaccines are perfectly safe, and in particular they don't cause autism.
- GMO-based food is safe to eat.
- You are personally committed to judging research papers by consistent standards of sample sizes, proper controls, well-defined hypotheses, reasonable modeling, and general overall rigor regardless of the conclusions they draw.
If you answered YES to all these items, your score is 1. If you did anything else your score is 0.
I would like to emphasize that if your score is 0, that doesn't mean you're a bad person. I have lots of perfectly decent friends in this category. All it means is that you aren't fully dedicated to following the science regardless of where it goes.
Kevin, perhaps in #2,, instead of "by biology" you meant to write "by genetics" ? Since .... well, the idea that cognition is about more than biology is .... anti-materialist ?
Though, upon reflection, yeah, I guess I can see how there are people who believe that there is more to the mind than biology.
Cognitive abilities in human beings are significantly affected by education, among other things. Cognition is clearly a biological process; cognitive ability is equally clearly affected by non-biological factors.
Yeah, I think #2 needs some unpacking. The plain reading of it is something like "brains are biological entities that perform cognitive function, and modifications to brains can impact their performance", which I think is unambiguously true.
The issue is that there is a lot of subtext that comes with a statement like that, and it's tempting to read it as a correlative argument in favor of some pretty whacko race-based cognition theories.
Uh yeah. I have a lot of reservations and caveats about #2 myself. For one thing: As far as I know, nobody can examine a brain anatomically and determine its IQ. We can only measure IQ or "cognitive performance" behaviorally.
It's as if we can't actually measure height, so we measure the proxy of jumping reach. Jumping reach is certainly correlated to height, but it isn't the same thing.
And similarly, brains can be nourished and grown in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. For instance, something I just read recently suggests that perfect pitch is something that is learned, albeit at maybe age 3 or 4 years, and requires intensive exposure to musical activity. And odd things happen to it when people hit their 60's. Obviously, biology is involved, but that statement makes me uncomfortable.
Yeah, it really does seem that high-IQ parents have higher-IQ children. But there are a lot of confounds there.
Here is our semiannual reminder that Spud Webb could dunk.
Education, environment, biology, and a whole lot of other things. I agree with you. When it comes to cognitive abilities, biology may not be at the top of the list.
Which is probably why Kevin wrote "significantly" (inarguable from what I can tell, once this adverb is employed).
I read his formulation as meaning primarily.
Cognitive ability can also be significantly impaired by emotional trauma during childhood.
What does significant even mean here?
Statistical significance can still be a pretty small number for example.
(a) Biology is correct, a superset of genetics.
Biology includes both random effects and targeted insults, in the womb or after birth (eg lead).
(b) And yes, quibbling about this ala so many of the comments below is exactly what puts you in category 0 -- you want to believe what you want to believe more than science, and you *will* find a way to convince yourself that dissension is "bad science" or "wasn't done correctly" or whatever.
Compare for example do you believe:
- 100% of gender is cultural, none is set at birth
- 0% of sexuality is cultural, all is set at birth
?
Interesting that dichotomy, no? But if you are an ideologue, yes, indeed that is exactly the woke stance today.
Mark me down as a zero. My ans were all Best We Have or To The Best of Our Knowledge.
I think that is a caveat Kevin forgot. Really, the whole list could be boiled down to "I accept what the majority of researchers say, which is at the moment…" followed by a followup "Should the consensus of researchers change, I am willing to change my own opinion as well."
Regarding #8, as a scientist I understand the spheres in which I am competent to judge the competence of research, and those spheres where I lack the specialized knowledge to judge. In the latter case I trust to the peer review process in legitimate scientific journals.
I'm not a scientist, although my father was, and I think I have a better than average background in the hard sciences. I do not feel qualified to judge, or usually even to understand, research papers; I rely on the opinions of experts in the relevant fields.
I would also judge the research as to whether or not the research as design follow ethics rules, aka no Tuskegee type studies etc.
I take it you're thinking of research on humans. The guys getting results from the large hadron collider, or astrophysicists studying supernovae, or a host of other fields of inquiry not involving living subjects, are not subject to the same rules.
Yes, peer review is worthy of respect, but this only applies to mature projects that have undergone continued study. Given the internet information age we live in, we are often exposed to preliminary or even totally bogus hypothesis and data. It is important to be able to consider such data and say this is: 1) serious data that justifies further investigation, 2) flakey data that is probably worthless, and 3) total bullshit. The whole Qanon thing (not to mention the whole concept of Trumpism) indicates too many people are way too willing to accept 3) because they "read it on the internet".
I would just like to have a bit more information on GMO before I'm completely ready to blanker say "safe to eat." Maybe that information has been out there and I've just not seen it or ignored it.
But at the current time, I'm cautious.
I think there's evidence that it's safe to eat. Safe to grow without environmental / ag industry harm may be another story.
I'm more sceptical, given the past track record of the "big Ag" industry (and industry in general). Monsanto and the other giants have NOT inspired confidence by their behavior (suing farmers for having crops downwind of fields sown with GMO seeds defined as "stealing OUR IP!")
Given the phenomenon of regulatory capture, I also lack confidence in the State or Federal government organizations that are supposed to be keeping tabs on them.
If I was assured that the modifications simply speeded up things that could be done more slowly by the old hybridization techniques, that would be one thing. But splicing in insecticide producing genes, or herbicide resistance to allow farmers to use weed killers more copiously? Even overlooking environmental damage
I agree with the others here. "Safe to eat" is a red herring. GMO food may be safe to eat, but the issue is really centered on is it safe to grow? What effect is there from releasing all these modified genes into the wild? Also, the use of GMO crops seems to be mostly to be able to use more herbicides and insecticides which cause more trouble than they are worth.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere here, just because one GMO plant was found "safe to eat" is not a blanket approval for all GMO crops that may be produced in the future. Each needs to be evaluated independently.
My question would be “how many Republicans would answer yes to all of those questions in their mind and how many would deny most of them with their mouth?”
Uh, ok. Many Democrats would say no to half of these, especially anti-vax democrats, who make up the bulk of anti-vaxxers
Uh, anti-vax Democrats do not make up the bulk of anti-vaxxers. They didn't even before the corona virus hit, and certainly don't now. Failure on #8.
Yeah they do. Most Republicans are full of it. They are flying toward the vaccines. Liberals, not so much.
You have absolutely no evidence this is true.
Fortunately, Robert Kennedy, Jr., is one of several Kennedys without interest in elective office.
He ***is*** the only thing keeping Chris Pratt from being worst Kennedy, though.
Yes but Bobbie Jr has been disowned by his family, the Democratic party and now Instagram.
Huzzah.
Chris Pratt is a Kennedy?? (cool)
He's banging Katherine Schwarzenegger.
I appreciate the elegance of the scoring system.
I'm going to avoid the other potentially politicized replies and just say I agree totally with this incredibly elegant scoring system. I'm going to try and incorporate it into my daily life!!
Should be Modified Stableford.
To encourage aggressive play.
"Childhood vaccines are perfectly safe, and in particular they don't cause autism."
To be sure, it is by now well established that they don't cause autism, and the arguments that it did were deeply flawed even before we became aware that the data in support of them was fraudulent.
But perfectly safe, no. The Cutter incident was a terrible tragedy. And while modern vaccines are more often formulated as antigens (and now mRNA), live attenuated virus vaccines are still in use (and the Astra-Zeneca SARS-CoV2 vaccine is one) and a modern day Cutter incident remains a slight possibility. Apart from that, there were cases of intussusception associated with some of the rotavirus vaccines. And there are various mild, moderate, and severe allergic reactions, all with low, but non-zero, incidence that people can experience with many vaccines. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against SARS-CoV2 have had a 2.5 per million incidence of anaphylaxis post administration. While these events are probably more related to the various adjuvants and stabilizers used in the formulation than to the vaccine antigen or vector itself, you cannot simply pretend that nobody getting a vaccine will ever experience adverse effects from it.
The fact that vaccines are often promoted as if they are "perfectly safe" may be one of the reasons so many people have become anti-vaxxers. They know in their gut that it can't be true, and it makes them mistrustful of the entire message.
Correction to above. The Cutter incident involved a *killed virus vaccine,* not a live attenuated virus, in which due to defective control of the manufacturing process, the virus remained alive and virulent and was injected into the arms of children--some of whom then went on to develop paralytic polio. Though the use of whole viruses (killed or live attenuated) is on the wane, with subviral antigen units and now mRNA on the rise, they are not yet gone from the repertoire, so the danger of a repeat of this kind of incident does remain.
You're being pretty pedantic here. I suppose you could adopt a standard that says that nothing is "perfectly safe". Fair enough. People fall down in the shower and die on occasion. So showers are not perfectly safe. People are killed by elevators, in plane crashes, in home or apartment fires, and so on. I even learned recently that rose thorns sometimes get lodged in people's knuckles and can cause severe arthritis or even lead to amputation, so roses are clearly not "perfectly" safe. Vaccines are as safe or safer than any of these activities and are certainly far safer than leaving yourself or your children at risk to the diseases vaccines prevent.
Yes, I am being pedantic, deliberately so. You made my point rather succinctly by saying that "nothing is 'perfectly safe.'" That is true. Everything carries risk, and people should be able to get accurate information about those risks to make their decisions. Calling anything "perfectly safe" is simply lying and it irks me that some people do that.
You are quite right that all of the untoward events you mention are more common than any of the serious vaccine reactions (though not some of the minor ones). But think about the Cutter incident. A lot of children were inoculated with live polio virus, and many were paralyzed or died. Modern pharmaceutical manufacturing practices make the likelihood that this would happen again much smaller. But no system is perfect. And if at some point the pressure to deregulate the pharma industry grows too high, we might well see another Cutter incident as companies cut corners. It's hard to quantify this risk, but it isn't zero.
It's because the big capitalist just wants to make money off of you signed 19th century white socialism. Ever been to Portland??? A bunch of white, new age quacks calling each other racists.
You should use the snark indicator to indicate if you a being snarky. I can't be sure if you are or not, but Portland (aka Portlandia) is one of my favorite cities, inspite of their police force.
I have been to Portland and you don't know what you're talking about. Nice Fox News talking points though.
9. 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'
A criteria that rules out Bigfoot and conservatism.
Denver Riggleman erasure.
Alas, I have never seen bigfoot, but I have seen way too many conservatives.
Fox News and Bigfoot TV shows are perfectly complimentary, one is indoors, one is outdoors, both are in pursuit of mysterious, shadowy and hairy things in the dark that the viewer alone is hip to.
No. Extraordinary claims require simply evidence. There's no such thing as extraordinary evidence and even if there were, holding certain things to different standards is unscientific.
The claim that I am eating a BLT for lunch requires almost no evidence. The claim that the bacon was made from dragon meat requires a bit more.
I think Carl Sagan obviously meant a lot of evidence.
With (8), I'm going to have to cop to eyeballing those most of the time. If I actually read a study past the first page, I pay much more attention. But usually I just glance at that to make sure it isn't insane or an extrapolation exercise.
And with (5), I find astrology useful in that one specific person in my life closely follows it. Knowing which nonsense is currently in whatever house provides me not-insignificant conversational leverage.
"I find astrology useful in that one specific person in my life closely follows it."
You might be intrigued by Robert Galbraith's latest, "Troubled Blood". It features a police detective who was, to put it in layman's terms, going off his rocker. He tried to analyze and explain one particular investigation in astrological terms, and by following his lines of thought through the star charts he used and illustrated, the case(s) were eventually solved. As you observed, it was necessary to take seriously the person's astrology-based rationales, even though the astrology itself could be rejected.
I once commented to someone that astrology was bunk. I was told that was a very ignorant position and almost burst out laughing.
It's a good thing she was real cute.
After a lifetime of practicing "science," I am aware of the limitations of science. Does that make me a 1, a 0 or an overthinker?
Liked.
As a social scientist (research and applied psychology), I have to add to 8. I’m skeptical that such a thing as a definitive study could exist in any social science, so any individual research paper has to be assessed in the context of other research into the same question(s). And that may extend into the ‘harder’ sciences; cf. the history of the Millikan experiment.
How many conservatives after four years of more of practicing "Trumpism", are aware of the limitations of Trump?
When astrology is president, it is not at all harmless. See Ronald Reagan, dementia and Nancy.
Regarding #7 (GMO), this is misleading.
There might be some people who claim that GMO food is not safe to eat, but the majority of the opposition to GMO food production focus their attention on potential ecological effects, for which there is sufficient evidence to be concerned about gene crossovers to adjacent species (or even, possibly, non-adjacent ones.
So yeah, GMO food is safe to eat. Safe to produce? Jury's still out on this.
yours sincerely,
Dr. Science (I have a Masters Degree in ... science!)
Another big issue is that the primary driver of GMO food is to allow the indiscrimante use of chemical pesticides. By the way, did you catch the recent news article about butterflies dying off?
Additionally, just because current GMO food is safe to eat doesn't mean that all future GMO food will be safe to eat.
the theory of evolution by natural selection is incomplete.
It isn't, and your voice of authority does not make it so. To quote James Randi, no amount of belief makes something true.
It is true that geneticists keep adding detail with regard to the mechanisms of natural selection. The theory is, at its base, tautological, and so is more of an axiom than a theory. The more fit are more likely to survive. How do we know the survivors are more fit? Well, because they survived.
Yes, I know that's an over simplification, but I think it's a fair oversimplification.
To mimic Churchill, the theory of evolution by natural selection is incomplete, except compared to all the competing theories.
9. You do NOT equate "I did the research" with "I searched the Internet."
Searching the internet isn’t necessarily so bad. The problem comes when your crazy uncle emails you a story from OAN, or when your social networking site suggests “you might find these posts interesting”.
Astrology presents a system of archetypes. Its antecedents (the symbolism of celestial bodies) are ancient in origin and universal. Including it as a criteria here, to prove whether one follows the science (whatever that means), is odd, at least.
What's odder still is insisting, reflexively, that it strays from science. It's really proto-scientific, and losing sight of that would prove that one can't possibly follow science because if there's one thing that science says, to me anyway, it's that if you miss something while you're doing your research, you've probably lost your way. But science has always been suspicious of things that can't be seen in the light of day.
Do the patterns of the stars and the planets provide evidence of pre-determined human behavior? Impossible to prove; and astrology doesn't claim to. It simply outlines a system of archetypes, ancient in origin and universal. An overlay that attempts to add some kind of meaning in the vastness of the mystery of the universe.
Until Astrology proposes and tests a mechanism by which the movement of celestial bodies can influence individual lives on Earth then it is unscientific nonsense.
Astrology is as scientific as reading tea leaves.
Here's how science works:
1. Make a prediction (hypothesis)
2. Do an experiment
If the experiment supports the prediction (add statistics as needed) then you can be more confident in your prediction going forward.
Has any astrological prediction been shown to be more likely than pure chance to be accurate? I think if the answer were yes, you would have mentioned it, so I am going with no. So astrology is not science, nor is it scientific.
" But science has always been suspicious of things that can't be seen in the light of day."
Yup, that is how science works. If you can't prove it (see it in the light of day) then you can't claim it is a valid hypothesis.
For the last one you should replace Conclusions with Results. I can't tell you how many studies produce perfectly decent results, but in the conclusions section the authors start spouting random, unsupported ideas. Unfortunately, that is the stuff that often gets reported in the news.
Most science involving people is going to have serious issues because ethics require methods that are somewhat compromised, and human intelligence gets in the way. You always have to grade those on a curve.
Um ...
Science never says that a particular view is "correct;" at most it says that the evidence available supports the view.
And in some of the examples it doesn't even do that:
"Childhood vaccines are perfectly safe, and in particular they don't cause autism."
The word "perfectly" should probably never be used in any discussion, and particularly not in any discussion about effects of things.
There ARE adverse effects to vaccines; they are generally far outweighed by the benefits, but childhood vaccines are not "perfectly safe."
In particular, some children through immunocompromisation or otherwise are vulnerable to bad outcomes from vaccines; they are why it is important to have as many other kids vaccinated, so that they don't get a disease that they are usually very susceptible to just because some parent was being an ignorant asshole.
Agreed, this is very important, science typically gives a model of (some aspect of) the world, and this model may be more or less good at depicting reality rather than "correct" or not.. To be "following the science" is to be humble in this respect, and in particular to be open to changing one's opinion when scientific research shows something previously not known.
Anyone who thinks scientists will endorse blanket statements like these without a bunch of caveats doesn't spend much time talking to scientists.
GMO foods are safe to eat is a limited view of their consequences. Whether GMO crops are safe for the environment and other ecological participants is not addressed by corporate science. Deliberate indifference allows many bad technological policies to be executed for profit just because the scientific consensus of no harm is done to humans through their consumption.
If you answered Yes to questions #2 and 3 but continue to eat french fries cooked in beef tallow, are these honest answers or another example viewing an issue from a strictly limited point of view?
Number 8 is a bit of head scratch. Most of us are in no position to judge research papers because we lack the background. That seems an odd criterion
I'll nitpick #5 and #8, although I mostly agree.
Vaccines are far safer on an individual basis than the alternative, and the benefits are higher if they are widespread--but the VICP exists for a reason: there is some risk of allergic reactions, high fevers, and so forth.
I'd quibble on research methodology on two fronts. First, I do think the standards need to vary at least some by the type of phenomenon being investigated - there will be much more evidence for efficacy of the COVID vaccine than of the latest cystic fibrosis treatment, simply because the population affected is so much larger. And I tend to be at least somewhat Bayesian--I would need more evidence to convince me that someone saw a snowy owl (very rare here) than to convince me they saw a great horned owl (very common).
You forgot: Nuclear Power is safe.
I'm so late, but...
In regards to the second question, I have a question (I'm breaking the rules, I know): removing biology, what then cognates?