The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard. Monbiot’s entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives, with the most amusing point being that after Leftists telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article. The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.

I want to say more about just one of them: The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable. That is however a matter of degree and of purpose. They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect. In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood. So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life! So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim. The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however, The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however. The second article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed. Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results. The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible. They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large.

So statistical significance is irrelevant. It is other forms of significance we have to look at. Let me put it this way: What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives. Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to “racism”. The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial. Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that. The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure. So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago: That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is. A much noted paper in the field even identified Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives! Can you get any madder than that? So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that “conservatives” AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance). How clueless can you get? What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives. They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them. It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think.

By contrast, I am a conservative so a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not: Provided a substantial prediction of vote. See here. So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless. The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with conservatism. I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For reference, the Canadian study is: “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact” by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

A physics education does however seem to have given them some faint attachment to the scientific method, so they go to considerable lengths to substantiate their claims. But do they turn to physics to substantiate their claims? Not at all. Far from offering any comparison of male and female work in physics, they turn to sociology! Like sociologists they have faith that questionnaire surveys will tell them something about reality. I did such surveys for many years and eventually concluded that they don’t.

Their anti-scientific orientation is most clearly revealed by “the dog that didn’t bark”, however. They ignore over a hundred years of research that repeatedly reveals women to have better verbal ability and men to have better mathematical ability. And since physics these days is little more than applied mathematics, that datum could hardly be more relevant. It suggests that not many women have what it takes to be good physicists.

They could of coures disagree with what is one of the most replicated findings in science but instead of disagreeing with it, they simply ignore it — thus violating one of the most fudamental canons of science: That you must have regard for what others before you have written on your subject.

So their own writing suggests one very good reason why there are not many women physicists: They are just not very good scientists. Their own work suggests that hormones take the place of rationality.

And in the end why does it matter that most physicists are men? I can’t see that humanity is badly served by that reality but the case that it does matter is presumably arguable. But they make no attempt to argue it. They just resort to that terminally destructive and totally unrealistic Leftist obsession with “equality”. They are very poor intellects indeed. Procrustes would be proud of them.

For reference, I reproduce below the concluding section of their article:

The global survey follows a body of work that has examined the importance to career success of access to resources and opportunities. The survey found that women are less likely than men to report access to various resources and opportunities that would be helpful in advancing a scientific career. It also confirmed, consistent with cultural norms, that men are more likely than women to have a spouse who will shoulder the burden of housework. We noted the cultural expectation that women are responsible for child care and documented survey results showing that parenting affects the careers of women more than it does the careers of men.

Admittedly, our results are derived from the testimony of survey respondents, and it is conceivable that the sex differences we have found exist not because women are treated differently but because they differ from men in their expectations about work. However, the results reported here will come as no surprise to the researchers who have already found that resources, opportunities, and family responsibilities affect women’s careers.4,6 We believe the results reflect an underlying reality of disadvantage—not differing work expectations—and that all the sex-based differences documented here adversely affect the careers of women physicists.

The low representation of women in physics is a problem the community needs to address, but the community also needs to address inequities in access to resources and opportunities. Cultural expectations about home and family also inhibit the progress of women physicists; those, of course, are much more difficult to change. Nonetheless, we look forward to a future in which science truly means science for all.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Note also that the term “obesity” has now lost all meaning. It is little more than a swear word. The boy below was recently described by Britain’s National Health Service as “obese”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Here at the site we often take Hollywood to task for its outrageous liberalism, and rightfully so. Of course it’s our job to look for the worst cases to alert you all about the nagging left-wing bias. But occasionally there are stories that are good ones and it is incumbent upon us to report those, too. This is one of those stories.

More often than not when we have stories out of Hollywood about life issues it is invariably a pro-abortion tale and in the case of scientific studies, it is usually some denizen of Tinseltown coming out forcefully for unethical fetal stem cell research. The destruction of life is de rigueur out there, unfortunately.

But not this time.

You might say that this celebrity has boldly gone where no Hollywooder has gone before. You also might wince at my horrible attempt at humor when you find out that we are here today to celebrate the efforts of Eugene W. Roddenberry Jr., the son of Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek.

You see, in October the son of the “Great Bird of the Galaxy” donated $5 million to stem cell research. But, unlike so many of the Hollywood persuasion, this gift is not earmarked for fetal stem cell research. It is instead going to a facility that specializes in adult stem cell research.

The generous donation from the Roddenberry Foundation was bestowed upon The Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, an independent research institute which is associated with the University of California, San Francisco.

As reported by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Roddenberry gift will, “expand these existing areas of expertise among Gladstone scientists by creating the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine – named after Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek.”

One of the notable scientists at Gladstone is Shinya Yamanaka, M.D., Ph.D., who is pursuing research into reprogramming adult cells into embryonic stem cells.

Why is all this so notable? Because this is essentially a pro-life pursuit instead of one of those usual, liberal anti-life efforts. After all fetal stem cell research has proven ineffective in the many years it has been pursued — no advances in medicine have been credited to fetal stem cells in the last 20 years — but many of the far left are married to it regardless. Worse, fetal stem cell research is highly controversial as human embryos are necessarily destroyed in the effort. This raises ethical questions about human life being destroyed for the sake of science.

Some of you might remember the controversy that George W. Bush wound up in when he allowed federal funds to be used for fetal stem cell research using stem cell lines created before August of 2001. In 2006 Bush successfully vetoed an effort to expand federal money for fetal stem cell research.

Unfortunately, sticking to his penchant for infanticide, in 2009 Obama reversed those federal limitations. It should be remembered that before he became a national figure, Obama was the only Illinois state Senator that favored the barbaric practice of partial birth abortions.

Sadly, Obama’s reversal of the Bush era rule was one built on ideology and not real science. Even U.S. News reported that embryonic stem cell research is an obsolete field, and U.S. News is hardly a bastion of conservatism.

So, kudos to Eugene Roddenberry for putting his money where it will not only do some good but will do so ethically. Unlike the ideology drenched Obama administration, Mr. Roddenberry is interested in real science.

I think his father would be proud.

The paper was of course zealous to rule out genetic differences but that does rather leave them without an explanation for Chinese excellence in mathematics. Regardless of the country in which they reside, Chinese tend to be prominent among leading mathematicians — and China itself is a major centre of mathematical excellence. Yet China is still in many ways a very traditional society in which the very notion of gender equality would normally be scoffed at. The way they abort girl babies is surely enough evidence of that.

Anyway, the paper more or less assumes what it has to prove. In a rather self-contradictory way, the authors seem to assume that educational performance fully indexes innate ability. The paper draws its “evidence” not from IQ tests but from various international measures of educational attainment. And educational attainment is the product of many things other than IQ. Hard work anyone? Social pressures anyone? So I partially agree with the first line of their “Conclusions”:

In summary, we conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls

You note that they skate entirely over IQ.

They go on to argue that eliminating gender “inequities” is needed to lift female mathematical achievements. After decades of feminism and affirmative action it is hard to imagine how more might be done on that front in the USA other than by procrustean quota systems so the recommendation is as vacuous as it is irrelevant.

Women will always be up against their lower level of mathematical ability that IQ tests reveal so clearly. In recent years women have been pushed into mathematics to satisfy feminist dogma but few will rise to the heights.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Note further that the study had NO data on whether breastfeeding children cuts the risk of obesity and diabetes in later life. That is just their theory. As the article below says, it is what the authors “believe”

Breastfeeding could help to prevent children developing diabetes and becoming obese later in life, scientists believe. New research shows that breastfed babies follow a different growth pattern to those who drink formula milk, which is likely to have future health benefits.

Breast milk lowers levels of the growth hormone IGF-1 and insulin in the blood, which slows the rate of growth even after the child has started on solid foods. Slower weight gain is known to encourage healthier eating patterns. By contrast, formula milk may increase the production of fat cells, which encourages weight gain throughout childhood.

The findings from LIFE – the Faculty of Life Sciences at Copenhagen University in Denmark – also suggest that the longer the period of breastfeeding, the lower a child’s weight at the age of 18 months.

The results come from analysis of a wider study of diet and wellbeing following 330 children at nine, 18 and 36 months. Anja Lykke Madsen, a member of the research team, said: ‘We can see that breastfeeding has a significant, measurable effect on the important growth regulators in the blood, IGF-I and insulin. The more times the child was breastfed, the lower the hormone levels.

‘This suggests that the child has a slightly lower risk of becoming overweight later in childhood.’ Research shows that breast milk protects babies against stomach bugs, chest infections, asthma, eczema, and allergies, and appears to bring general health advantages in later life. ‘The longer the children were breastfed, the lower their weight at 18 months. It’s as simple as that’

More here

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

(SMH) IF YOU are down a blind alley searching for that perfect Christmas gift for your climate sceptic friend, you could do worse than slinging them a book on Emotional Intelligence. Why? Research is mounting that your friend is the victim of one of the brain’s many computing glitches. More particularly, he has been derailed by an emotional response that is at best unhelpful and at worst catastrophic. He has capitulated to the pleasure of the here and now.

…In the climate realm, fabrication is also rife. Enthralled by their emotional biases, sceptics mouth desperate appeals to the corruptibility of scientists, or to the fallibility of climate prediction models.

To err is human and we should forgive many their inability to constrain the draw of the emotions. But this failure is inexcusably egregious in our politicians who are steering the ship for the long voyage, not just around the next reef. To those who still succumb to immediate gratification at the expense of our long-term good, I say welcome any Christmas gifts on brain bugs and emotional intelligence with open arms. Our grandchildren’s future could depend on it.

If you want to buy your alarmist friends a Christmas gift, I suggest you purchase the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, and tell them to implement all 77 ideas. Better yet, buy them nothing, because all the CO2 caused by Christmas is evil in their minds, and giving them nothing would reduced their carbon footprint.

Could the earthquake in Haiti have been a man-made disaster?

No. But, don’t let reality, history, and science get in the way.

If you ever doubted that human action was capable of profoundly effecting the Earth’s ecology, consider this: Scientists now believe that our mismanagement of the environment is quite literally causing the Earth to shake.

New research has confirmed a correlative link between the occurrence of major earthquake events, such as the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and rapid soil erosion caused by deforestation and man-made climate change, reports the Independent.

The idea that the weather plays a role in triggering earthquakes is highly controversial, and scientists have largely discounted previous attempts to establish a link between earthquakes and changes in atmospheric pressure, such as what happens during typhoons and hurricanes.But a new study, recently presented at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, takes a different angle. It looks at how changes to the weight of soil bearing down on faultlines might serve to release geological stress.

“Very wet rain events are the trigger. The heavy rain induces thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the Earth’s surface, releasing the stress and encouraging movement along faults,” said Shimon Wdowinski of the University of Miami in Florida.

And we all know that heavy rain and hurricanes only started when Mankind decided to build stuff and stop living in caves. The story goes on in breathless fashion telling us about hurricanes and tropical storms that hit Haiti that year, because Haiti is in an area that typically gets hit by tropical storms a lot, but, this time it’s different, because someone drove a fossil fueled vehicle while talking on an iPhone and eating a BigMac. Therefore, there must be a correlation.

Could there be? Possibly. That’s what science is for. But, obviously, it can’t simply be natural, it has to be “extreme weather events” caused by Mankind living a modern life

These findings should also cause a shudder in our collective conscience. Since an uptick in extreme weather is one of the many unfortunate consequences of man-made climate change, we may want to reevaluate our role in disasters that were once believed to be entirely ‘natural.

See? We should be super scared. If Mother Nature News was so scared, they’d shut the website down, because it uses lots of electricity which comes primarily from fossil fuels.

Two takeaways a week are enough to increase the risk of diabetes and heart disease, research shows. Young adults were more likely to have hidden health problems if they treated themselves to fast food on a twice-weekly basis, the study found.

Additionally, women appear to be more susceptible to the dangers. They had more warning signs, such as high blood sugar levels and increased insulin than men.

The results suggest many young professionals who are too busy to cook may be setting themselves up for serious health problems. Diabetes affects an estimated 2.5million Britons. Around 10 per cent of cases are due to type one, which is thought to be caused by a faulty immune system.

The remaining 90 per cent are type two, which is closely linked to unhealthy diet and lifestyle. The condition occurs when the body loses its ability to make use of glucose, a type of sugar that is released when we eat.

As levels rise, circulation suffers and blood vessels can be damaged. Left untreated, type two diabetes can raise the risk of heart attacks, blindness and amputation.

Researchers from the University of Tasmania and two other Australian science institutions studied the diet and lifestyles of 1,896 men and women aged 26 to 36. Almost 40 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women ate a takeaway twice a week or more.

The volunteers underwent a range of medical checks, including tests for glucose and insulin levels. High levels of both mean the body is heading for type two diabetes.

Researchers found women who had takeaways twice or more a week had significantly higher blood sugar levels than those who ate them once a week or less. They also had higher insulin and scored much higher on a test for signs of becoming resistant to the hormone – a warning sign of diabetes. Although men in the study also showed damage, the effects were much less severe.

Researchers said it was hard to tell if it was the fast food or excess weight caused by poor diet and lack of exercise that caused the problems.

They added: ‘It is unclear whether the differences [between one takeaway a week and two] are clinically significant. But they may represent an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes.’

The survey was published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In 2008, a Which? study found a single Indian takeaway contained 23.2 grammes of saturated fat – more than a woman’s entire daily allowance.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

His industry did not however seem to include any critical thought. His conclusions are simply reinforcement of the conventional wisdom and he pays no heed to the elementary truth that correlation is not causation — preferring to rely instead on the speculations of epidemiologists. He even makes significant use of heavily criticized analyses from the sensationalist WCRF — e.g. here. Some of his conclusions may be correct but we have no means of knowing which they are. Many of the factors he identified could well in fact be social class effects

Almost half of cancers are caused by an unhealthy lifestyle that could be avoided by quitting smoking, losing weight, exercising and drinking less alcohol, the most comprehensive study of its kind has found.

Around 134,000 cancers each year are the result of a poor lifestyle, Cancer Research UK has found.

In the most wide reaching study yet conducted into the issue, it was found that 14 different lifestyle factors ranging from smoking, to lack of exercise, eating too much salt, not having babies, drinking too much and being overweight contributed to four in every ten cancers diagnosed in the UK.

The findings expose the myth that developing cancer is ‘bad luck’ or down to your genes, the researchers said.

Previous studies had suggested around 80,000 cancers a year could be prevented but they did not take into account occupational exposures to things like asbestos, infections that can cause cancer and sunburn as the latest research has.

In a complex set of research studies, scientists calculated how many cancers and of what type could be attributed to each of the 14 lifestyle factors. The findings were published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Smoking was the biggest factor, causing nearly one in five of all cancers.

But Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said most people would not know that a quarter of all breast cancer cases could be prevented along with half of colorectal cancers.

He added: “Leading a healthy lifestyle doesn’t guarantee that someone will not get cancer but doing so will significantly stack the odds in your favour.”

Dr Kumar said tackling unhealthy lifestyle factors linked to cancer would also reduce the risk of a host of other killer diseases such as heart disease, respiratory problems, kidney disease and others.

Professor Max Parkin, a Cancer Research UK epidemiologist based at Queen Mary, University of London, and study author, said: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get it.

“Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that around 40 per cent of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change. “We didn’t expect to find that eating fruit and vegetables would prove to be so important in protecting men against cancer. And among women we didn’t expect being overweight to have a greater effect than alcohol.”

The study found that alcohol was responsible for 6.4 per cent of breast cancers and almost one in ten liver cancers.

Three quarters of stomach cancers could be avoided, mostly by not smoking, eating too much salt and consuming more fruit and vegetables.

Red meat consumption led to 2.7 per cent of cancers, almost 8,500 cases. Obesity was linked to more than five per cent of cancers or almost 18000 cases, including a third of womb cancers.

Lack of breastfeeding was linked to 3.1 per cent of breast cancers and 17 per cent of ovarian cancers.

The study did not examine how many cancer deaths would be prevented with a healthier lifestyle.

Sara Hiom, director of information at Cancer Research UK, said: “We know, especially during the Christmas party season, that it is hard to watch what you eat and limit alcohol and we don’t want people to feel guilty about having a drink or indulging a bit more than usual. But it’s very important for people to understand that long term changes to their lifestyles can really reduce their cancer risk.”

The World Cancer Research Fund did a similar exercise in 2007 coming up with recommendations to individuals on how to reduce their cancer risk by eating less red meat, taking more exercise and staying slim.

Dr Rachel Thompson, Deputy Head of Science for World Cancer Research Fund, said: “This adds to the now overwhelmingly strong evidence that our cancer risk is affected by our lifestyles.

“We hope this new study helps to raise awareness of the fact that cancer is not simply a question of fate and that people can make changes today that can reduce their risk of developing cancer in the future.”

Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “No one chooses to have cancer and it would be wrong to blame people for making wrong lifestyle choices.

“For a long time, people have been told that eating healthily, not smoking and exercising regularly can benefit them, and these figures show again the impact a healthy lifestyle can have. Yet these healthy lifestyle messages are clearly not reaching enough people. They also need to be made more relatable to people’s everyday lives.

“There needs to be a cultural change, so that people see physical activity as an integral part of their lives, not just a optional add-on.”

Public Health Minister Anne Milton said: “We all know that around 23,000 cases of lung cancer could be stopped each year in England if people didn’t smoke.

“By making small changes we can cut our risk of serious health problems – give up smoking, watch what you drink, get more exercise and keep an eye on your weight.”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here