Category: Science & Technology

More evidence that it’s all in the genes

Scientists have raised new questions about free will, with some of the first evidence that the way people behave towards each other can be controlled by their genes rather than their environment and upbringing.

They have found that people with a rare genetic mutation known as Williams syndrome have brains that work abnormally in social situations, producing erratic and inappropriate behaviour.

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Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, July 16, 2005 at 09:50 AM in Science & Technology
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The Power of Propane

When oil and gas are depleted Americans will have to go back to charcoal, but will baby back ribs taste the same?

I enjoyed this Independence Day feast with a Bass Ale! ( A counter-revolutionary statement? )

Posted by leslie on Monday, July 4, 2005 at 07:00 PM in Science & Technology
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The Peak Oil “Ratbags” strike again!

I don’t know how much simpler I can make this for the peak oil ratbags……

and

So I do hope the peak oil ratbags will now move on to some other fallacy.  Jew-bashing perhaps? - the one and only JJR

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Friday, July 1, 2005 at 04:32 PM in Science & Technology
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Ethanol From Cellulose: Prospects And Implications

In response to John Ray...........................

By Andrew R.B. Ferguson

Abstract: The last study of the energy balance of producing ethanol from cellulose was back in 1979. It showed that the energy inputs required were 3.3 times the energy contained in the ethanol output. Nevertheless the belief has persisted that producing ethanol from cellulose may become viable. This paper attempts to interpret the most recent plans for improving the process. It concludes that the best plans on the drawing board, at the present time, indicate a positive energy balance, with inputs comprising about 63% of the ethanol output.

However, the net energy capture remains too low to be significantly useful in terms of supporting present levels of population. It is about 3 parts in 10,000 of the insolation (solar energy), or 0.5 kW/ha. Ethanol from corn, according to the more optimistic analyses, also achieves 3 parts in 10,000, and that of course is also non-viable.

Because of the reduced ecological damage caused by perennial crops, ethanol from cellulose may seem worth pursuing, if only a way could be found to make the inputs negligible in comparison to the output. The paper goes on to view the solar fraction of 3 parts per 10,000 within a wider context.

All sources of renewable liquid energy are inadequate when set against the net energy density that is achieved from extracting oil from wells, which we estimate as being the equivalent of capturing all 10,000 parts in 10,000 of insolation, or even from producing synthetic gasoline from coal — equivalent to capturing 2200 parts in 10,000 of insolation. 3 parts per 10,000 is a pale shadow of the fossil fuel net energy densities which have been the sine qua non of the 4400 million population growth in the last century. There is a manifest need for nations to reduce their populations before fossil fuels become scarce.

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 at 02:43 PM in Science & Technology
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ExxonMobil Sounds Silent Peak Oil Alarm

Source: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
[May 29, 2005]

SYNOPSIS: The fine print of The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View report downplays the potential of oil shale, a misnomer, and Canadian tar sands.
 
Without any press conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world’s largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years.

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Wednesday, June 15, 2005 at 04:12 PM in Science & Technology
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But, of course, the thought police are right: Race Does Not Exist.  For now.

DNAPrint Genomics Inc today announced that it has begun research on developing 3D biometric applications for the Company’s DNAWitness(TM) law enforcement forensics technology.

“The ability to interpret whether DNA recovered at a crime scene can reveal anything about a person’s likely facial features and other attributes of physical appearance would be a significant tool for forensic investigators and a valuable enhancement for our DNAWitness product,” stated DNAPrint President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Gabriel.

So began an article that was brought to my attention today.  As science research it is interesting in its own right – the growing power and influence of genomics in crime investigation is a hit the bad guys cannot counter.  But in addition to that the DNAPrint research sort of bridges my preoccupation with genetic structure to JR’s interest with phenotype.  And that puts it firmly in MR territory, so …

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Posted by JW Holliday on Friday, June 10, 2005 at 05:13 PM in Science & Technology
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Sorry, but we’ll never understand women

So science has pronounced.  The final, seemingly unanswerable question has apparently been answered.  Woman and her mystique lies bared beneath the detached, indeed pitilessly disinterested gaze of, to all intents and purposes, androgenous scientific enquiry.

The varying ease with which women reach sexual climax is more heavily influenced by genetic factors than any other, British scientists have found. Inheritance outstrips the contributions made by upbringing, culture or male bedroom skills.

The study of almost 1,400 pairs of female twins revealed that genes affect arousal at least as strongly as they do medical conditions in which their role has long been established, such as hypertension, migraine and depression.

It also suggests that the elusiveness of the female orgasm is evolved, probably because it confers a reproductive advantage that is triggered only with a particularly desirable partner ...

... “The theory goes that if a man is considered powerful enough, strong enough or thoughtful enough, in bed or in the cave, then he’s likely to hang around as a long-term partner and be a better bet for bringing up children,” Professor Tim Spector, of St Thomas’ Hospital in London, who led the research, said.

“Women who orgasm too easily might be less good at selecting partners.”

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Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, June 8, 2005 at 10:53 AM in Science & Technology
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The difference between science and pseudo-moral programs.

The following one-page article is a good example of writing about a subject, and slanting it with pseudo-morality as regards humans and their relationship with our planet. As a eugenicist, I try to refrain from declaring that unless we act quickly in a certain way, “humans will evolve back to being apes,” or some other such dire but un-provable speculation. Yet, the desire on the part of those promoting the preservation of biodiversity could be used to argue for human biodiversity and the preservation of races and even the formation of new races or breeding populations. Some groups could breed for athletic ability, intelligence, beauty, and yet others for a host of preferred behavioral traits (happiness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc.).

I would argue then that people who plead for the preservation of biodiversity are no different from those of us who argue for the application of eugenics to improve our children’s genetic quality. In both cases, the argument is not scientific but a program to fulfill a desire or to bring about one’s worldview. It is often said that eugenics is a pseudoscience, but in fact, it is not a science at all. Just like those who worry about biodiversity, they have no way of proving that with the loss of biodiversity humans would be better or worse off—at this point it is mere speculation. Just as a eugenicist may be able to show that on average, intelligence is now declining, that fact does not dictate a solution or a program. A eugenic’s program then needs no justification, and neither does a program for preserving biodiversity. The difference is, those who argue for biodiversity have been able to pass laws to protect species, while eugenics has been shunned as inhumane or unworkable. The only difference in these two programs is that eugenics is allowed when paid for and practiced by the individual, while biodiversity has been forced on all of society with laws to protect endangered species while stopping technological progress.

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Posted by Matt Nuenke on Friday, June 3, 2005 at 06:31 PM in Science & Technology
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Out of India?

The theory of human evolution seems to be headed for a new spin with the revelation that human species originated in Asia, pouring cold water over the “Out of Africa” belief that suggest that humans originated in Africa.

The study published in the latest proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, states that the finding of fossils in Pakistan of the three newly discovered primate species, which lived 30 million years ago, throws ample light on the fact that primates originated in Asia.

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Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, June 2, 2005 at 09:44 AM in Science & Technology
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A clown uncloned

Today I added yet another reason to my already long list of reasons why I absolutely loathe Chimpoleon Bush.  Even more than was the case with Clinton, I have a rich collection of disagreements with our President covering … oh, virtually everything.  Take away gun control and that’s it.  It is everything.

Bush is “conservative” (in the Red State sense) in ways he should never be.  He is anti-science.  He is anti-progress.  He is pro-outsourcing/big business.

He is far left - again in ways he should never be.  He is pro-immigration. He is pro-diversity.  He is ruinous to the US educational system because he ignores racial differences in IQ (“No Child Left Behind”).  He wages wars ostensibly to spread “democracy”.  Etc, etc.

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Posted by JW Holliday on Friday, May 20, 2005 at 07:12 PM in Science & Technology
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Male and female brains are basically different after all!

Sadly for the feminists!  Research showing big and significant differences in male and female brains now goes back a long way.  Below are a few excerpts from a recent survey of the state of our knowledge in that field

A generation of neuroscientists came to maturity believing that “sex differences in the brain” referred primarily to mating behaviors, sex hormones and the hypothalamus.  That view, however, has now been knocked aside by a surge of findings that highlight the influence of sex on many areas of cognition and behavior, including memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and the brain’s response to stress hormones. This progress has been accelerated in the past five to 10 years by the growing use of sophisticated noninvasive imaging techniques such as positron-emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can peer into the brains of living subjects.

These imaging experiments reveal that anatomical variations occur in an assortment of regions throughout the brain. Jill M. Goldstein of Harvard Medical School and her colleagues, for example, used MRI to measure the sizes of many cortical and subcortical areas. Among other things, these investigators found that parts of the frontal cortex, the seat of many higher cognitive functions, are bulkier in women than in men, as are parts of the limbic cortex, which is involved in emotional responses. In men, on the other hand, parts of the parietal cortex, which is involved in space perception, are bigger than in women, as is the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that responds to emotionally arousing information—to anything that gets the heart pumping and the adrenaline flowing. These size differences, as well as others mentioned throughout the article, are relative: they refer to the overall volume of the structure relative to the overall volume of the brain.

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Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, May 1, 2005 at 09:35 AM in Science & Technology
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Slipping away from the Enlightenment—is Science Dying?

Over the last couple of years, the fragility of the scientific method has left me wondering how there could be such a divide over what science means and where we are going as a society—especially politics, academia, and culture. The latest flashpoint has been over Harvard University President Lawrence Summers’ comments that there “may” be innate differences between men and women, and that “may” shed some light on why more men are in engineering and math. Science it seems has been vanquished from academia, because his statement is the very essence of what science is all about—getting at the facts. The problem for the public however, is that science is very healthy and advancing at a remarkable pace, as long as it does not touch on certain issues.

We are deluded into thinking that we are a scientific nation, using science to cure illness, clean up the environment, make better automobiles, giving impotent men new found confidence by restoring their ability to have an erection, as well as exploring deep space, and inner space. But science is not just about asking counterintuitive questions about those areas that most of us would like to have answers to, like how to cure cancer. It is also about asking counterintuitive questions in those areas that make some or even most people very uncomfortable—like the equality of the races, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, the true causes of warfare, and even whether freedom is what humans desire, or is it a lot more complex than that? The next world war may be riding on that question, as the Bush gospel of “all humans want freedom” has made it now the driving force for expanding American hegemony around the world.

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Posted by Matt Nuenke on Saturday, March 12, 2005 at 11:08 AM in Science & Technology
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The Japanese response to falling birthrates

There are some jobs the Japanese just wont do!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7152895/

Posted by Phil Peterson on Friday, March 11, 2005 at 08:31 PM in Science & Technology
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Gay gene or gay virus?

Thanks to “Thrasymachus” I came across this VERY interesting interview with an expert in population biology, Gregory Cochran, here on the subject of the so-called “gay gene”—a gene nobody has been able to find.  I didn’t realize that the rate of discordance among indentical twins was so high.  Identical twins are normally identical in just about EVERYTHING so the fact that only one of a pair of identical twins tends to be homosexual is most telling.  It is just about as good a proof of NON-genetic causation as you can get.  The idea that homosexuality is caused by such environmental influences as poor social skills or a female-dominated home would seem to be ruled out by the twin studies too as identical twins also tend to have a very similar environment as well as identical genes.  There is another article by Cochran here setting out his thinking on the matter.  Basically, he says that if genes and upbringing don’t make you homosexual, viruses probably do.  You can actually “catch” homosexuality.  If ever his theories become widely known, I think his life will be in danger.  At the least there would be attempts to lock him up for “hate speech”.

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Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, February 19, 2005 at 09:30 PM in Science & Technology
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Homosexuality

Derbyshire considers the causes of homosexuality in his recent piece for NRO.

I’ve got an interview with Greg Cochran on the subject up on my blog.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, February 17, 2005 at 12:43 AM in Science & Technology
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The science and scientism of race

A short time ago in this forum I was inspired by some recent reading to make a longish comment on the “Race Does Not Exist” (RDNE) debate. My own views on this are that this issue is too important to be left to experts who should be on tap, not on top. Also the issue is not wholly a scientific debate and the scientific view should be welcome but is not the deciding factor. The reading that has got me going is the Jay Klein and Naoyuki Takahata book mentioned below and “The Restitution of Man: C S Lewis and the Case against Scientism by Michael Aeschliman.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, January 30, 2005 at 04:57 AM in Science & Technology
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If this doesn’t work for blokes too I’ll have to join the left

Drinking alone is a miserable business, so this is one alcoholic experience no lady should be asked (or able) to undertake solo.

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, January 24, 2005 at 03:33 PM in Science & Technology
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The Curious Death of Science

A person with a scientific and liberal education is a man “in harmony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter”, said Thomas Henry Huxley FRS, 1825-1895.

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Posted by leslie on Sunday, December 12, 2004 at 09:51 PM in Science & Technology
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