FSTDT

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and others #fundie news.sciencemag.org

Representative Louie Gohmert (R–TX) is worried that scientists employed by the U.S. government have been running roughshod over the rights of Americans in pursuit of their personal political goals. So this week Gohmert, the chair of the oversight and investigations subpanel of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee, held a hearing to explore “the consequences of politically driven science.” Notably absent, however, were any scientists, including those alleged to have gone astray.

“The purpose of this hearing is to hear from real people, mammals called human beings that have been harmed by the federal government,” Gohmert said in opening the 29 April hearing, which featured testimony from three Republican-called witnesses on alleged misdeeds by researchers with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Park Service (NPS).

Neither of those agencies, however, was present to respond. The lone witness called by the panel’s Democrats was science historian Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University, best known for her studies of how the tobacco and energy industries have attempted to sow doubt about health and climate research that poses a potential threat to their interests. Her take on the hearing: It “wasn’t really about the science at all,” but broader disagreements over environmental policy and the role of government.

One Republican witness, Kathleen Hartnett White, an environmental policy expert with the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, detailed how an environmental group had relied on “weak government science” to sue the state of Texas in a bid to provide adequate water supplies to habitat used by the endangered whooping crane. In particular, the group relied on FWS population surveys that it said showed about 20 of the big birds had died in 2008 and 2009 because of the state’s failure to supply adequate water. But the agency ultimately decided that the survey methods that produced those results were unreliable—undermining the environmental group’s position and contributing to a court defeat. (The case is now on appeal.) Hartnett White, however, argued the agency didn’t do enough to intervene in the litigation: “FWS’ silence was deafening,” she noted in her prepared statement.

jamespannozzi #fundie news.sciencemag.org

(The truth is, for every person singing the praises of homeopathy you can find ten who tried it and are still suffering--or worse. These people walk away quietly, and you never hear their stories, and you never take them into account)

The truth is, for every person singing the praises of chemotherapy, you can find ten who tried and are still suffering - or are dead. You never take them into account. There's no saving grace here just lots of wasted money and what seems like a nice science about "killing" cancer cells. Take a closer look please and stop ignoring what could be the greatest medical breakthrough in centuries.

Homeopathy is real and works. Nobody knows why it works. Maybe, if researchers are given a chance to find out, we'll know. Maybe it really didn't work, never worked - but anyone who reads can see the absurdity of the placebo rationalization or any of the other explain aways. Too bad the mere possibility, or reality, that it works is a threat to conventional medicine or at least some aspects of it. On second thought maybe that's a good thing. Maybe conventional medicine is not quite everything it has been made out to be. Maybe everyone is gradually figuring that out.

wrongisright #fundie news.sciencemag.org

(In response to an article about the life of a chimeric, hermaphroditic bird)

I call BS. How do they know this? Did they capture the bird and study it? How do they know it is not simply a coloration issue. Let us assume they are correct. Is this bird 'normal'? Is this bird not suffering from a medical condition? Why do they not refer to it as a birth defect that should be looked into to be corrected? NO, this is written in support of some LGBT 'they're born that way' hype. People are born with cleft lips, why not just say, 'they're born that way' and leave them be? People are born with any number of other issues and we do not just accept it because they were 'born that way'. This bird, on its own in nature (if we continue to assume the stated position of the writer) is not likely to breed. This would not be 'normal'. I also suppose if we are to shrug and say 'they're born that way' and leave them be we will not look into either the environmental (pollution, pesticides, herbicides, Monsanto) or the possible medical solutions to the defect because we would not want them to feel bad about themselves nor be called a homophobe for doing so.

Bill Jackson #racist news.sciencemag.org

I have not read the book, but it seems to me that there is an epidemic of infectious political correctness involved.
I can see the variations in the races, some for resistance to the sun in Africa, the heart of mankind. Some for absorption of sun to make Vitamin D as in the northern races. These show as differences in skin color.
We know that the most frequent winners of Marathons come from an area in Africa - Kenya, and so on. careful analysis of the DNA of these people will see what this is.
Similarly races all over the world have adapted to their local environment. In the far North, the enemy is the climate, the unremitting cold, which prevents unaided survival and the Inuit have developed a technology and a society that together allow survival.
In Africa, the climate is warm, and the enemy comes from other large predators, and from the largest predator of all - man. African societies have evolved to create a society and a technology that allows for survival.

In both these cases, the social nature of the people are very different. The tribal Inuit look on all other Inuit as kin and readily exchange wives to prevent inbreeding caused by isolation, thus Inuit have no wars and fight over no women.
In an African tribal milieu, the enemy is likely to be another tribe as well as predators, and so African have evolved to deal with them. Is this by greated battle readyness than the Inuit? An inbred protective aggressiveness? It may well be.

We are all kin, but we do vary, and all manner of measurable aspects of mankind can be expected to vary from place to place, much like Darwin's finches, they have evolved strengths that will win their battle for survival in their area.

Was not Archimedes killed by a Roman? His brain was of little use to him at that juncture. Races might have optimised their brains for kinetic skills in Africa - the only way to survive.
The persistent persecution of Jews may well have presented them with an opportunity to develop ways to solve their problems by intellectual processes = the Nobel winner ratio?

We can not make some aspects of human capability taboo by way of Political Correctness, we need to know and understand all of it.