Does Science Always Self-Correct?

@philokalia said
One would think that the elephant in the room is actually quite clear at this point, friend:

The disparity in IQs by ethnic group and race are thus inherited, meaning the notion that we are born as blank slates that are cognitively equal does not have a scientific basis.

Or would you disagree with that still?

The career of James Watson has been utterly decimated ...[text shortened]... anyone really advancing this kind of perspective in 2019 -- and Pinker has not come out and said it.

I don't believe at all that IQs are inherited purely based on race or sex for that matter. There is nothing that makes anyone less than due to race, but the culture they are in can lay a good or a poor foundation for intellectual growth. If your culture prided itself on learning or if your culture looked down on those that wanted to better themselves, that will have more to do with IQ through generations than what skin color anyone is, or nationality anyone is in my opinion. I've worked in a multicultural multinational company and race had nothing to do with who were the smartest people in the room.

@deepthought said
@wildgrass
Non-coding DNA form a series of switches which activate and deactivate genes and have significance roughly as an instruction manual for the chemistry set that is the coding DNA. I'm way of my field, and don't understand this well, but junk DNA isn't junk.

@philokalia
There is an enzyme called transposase which allows genes to be moved around. During neur ...[text shortened]... find the relevant segments later and post the video and the time into, but don't have time just now.

The two relevant videos are below, really you need to watch all of both. To check I'm not making it up watch the start of the second one as it summarizes the first 😉 so that's molecular genetics 2 from 0:00 to about 8:00 - this covers the Wildgrass point. For the Philokalia point again from molecular genetics 2 start watching at 20:00 until 32:40 and especially (if you're short of time) 31:00 to 32:40.
molecular genetics 1: YouTube
molecular genetics 2: YouTube

@deepthought said
@wildgrass
Non-coding DNA form a series of switches which activate and deactivate genes and have significance roughly as an instruction manual for the chemistry set that is the coding DNA. I'm way of my field, and don't understand this well, but junk DNA isn't junk.
My source for both these claims is a lecture given by Robert Sapolsky about 9 years ago as part of a cou ...[text shortened]... find the relevant segments later and post the video and the time into, but don't have time just now.

Correct. But most geneticists aren't studying function. Rather they are looking at whether or not an individual has a variant, and the aggregate of phenotypes. So you identify a house that has a light switch turned up and one that's turned down. Can you now use that information to make inferences about energy efficiency or square footage, without knowing what the switch does? If you flip that light switch experimentally and cannot identify what change occurred, if any, then how can you draw any conclusions on its importance? Despite a strong correlation it could be entirely irrelevant.

That said, functional studies related to non coding DNA are emerging and are very powerful. We have spent the last 20 years looking for disease-causing mutations in exons, but there's waaay more to the story. Some non-coding DNA is required for embryonic development, or stress responses, or cognitive function, etc. Of course since the vast majority of sequencing data is only in the coding regions, we're a long way from understanding population-level variants at these regions and their relative contributions to human disease.

@deepthought said
The two relevant videos are below, really you need to watch all of both. To check I'm not making it up watch the start of the second one as it summarizes the first 😉 so that's molecular genetics 2 from 0:00 to about 8:00 - this covers the Wildgrass point. For the Philokalia point again from molecular genetics 2 start watching at 20:00 until 32:40 and especially (if you ...[text shortened]... w.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRXA1_e30o
molecular genetics 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFILgg9_hrU

I think the speaker has an agenda so you might not get some here to watch it.
(unless they agree with the agenda, so they might)

@kellyjay said
I think the speaker has an agenda so you might not get some here to watch it.
(unless they agree with the agenda, so they might)

It's a lecture course at Stanford, so he's constrained by educational standards. I don't know what his personal politics are, his Wikipedia page says that he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew and became an atheist at age 13, in so far as that is relevant to a discussion about the genetic basis of intelligence.

@deepthought said
It's a lecture course at Stanford, so he's constrained by educational standards. I don't know what his personal politics are, his Wikipedia page says that he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew and became an atheist at age 13, in so far as that is relevant to a discussion about the genetic basis of intelligence.

You don't think he is attempting to prove a point?

@kellyjay said
You don't think he is attempting to prove a point?

There's a section where he argues against the Intelligent Design arguments against evolution by natural selection - if that's what you're referring to. I don't think there's any evidence that he has a huge agenda with regard to the point in question here, which is the extent to which genetics affects intelligence.

@deepthought said
There's a section where he argues against the Intelligent Design arguments against evolution by natural selection - if that's what you're referring to. I don't think there's any evidence that he has a huge agenda with regard to the point in question here, which is the extent to which genetics affects intelligence.

My apologies to you.
I was making a dig at others at your OP's expense, and I got you caught up in it, I'm sorry my bad!

The post that was quoted here has been removed

I believe all scientist can be objective, it isn't the scientist that should be looked at, but the work they do. The same can be said about anyone, if you have bias towards or against anything prior to watching, listening, reading it colors what is seen or in some cases avoided. The same can be said about speakers and so on too, all people have bias, but can they set it aside to give data an unbias look?

@kellyjay said
I believe all scientist can be objective, it isn't the scientist that should be looked at, but the work they do. The same can be said about anyone, if you have bias towards or against anything prior to watching, listening, reading it colors what is seen or in some cases avoided. The same can be said about speakers and so on too, all people have bias, but can they set it aside to give data an unbias look?

So you dis a scientist who you think has an agenda that goes against your religion but the lectures you posted clearly were biased towards religion so that is ok with you. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.

@sonhouse said
So you dis a scientist who you think has an agenda that goes against your religion but the lectures you posted clearly were biased towards religion so that is ok with you. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.

Actually I'm okay with any scientist whose findings are being presented no matter what they found. I was actually thinking of you when I started this, cut someone off just because without giving them a fair listening. It was without a doubt hypocrisy, I'm surprised you saw it.

@kellyjay said
Actually I'm okay with any scientist whose findings are being presented no matter what they found. I was actually thinking of you when I started this, cut someone off just because without giving them a fair listening. It was without a doubt hypocrisy, I'm surprised you saw it.

I guess everyone has some form of bias but we have to look at them critically and decide whether it means anything in the large picture.

I am biased to believe science will grow and I figure that is based on what I see in the past and we can't see what new things will turn up but if you go to phys.org you see new findings every day which is why I say we will know more about most everything tomorrow than we do today and we know more today than we did yesterday. That is simple observation not faith.

Your bias is towards creationism and that will never change so in that regard you are stuck in one POV while my POV changes week by week.

If we find real evidence evolution is totally bogus we will be forced to go with it but so far it looks to me and a lot of other folks evolution is right even though as much as you and the rest of the religious set wants to conflate OOL with evolution while scientists see that as two separate science disciplines.

Evolutionary biologist don't really care HOW life started, they study the known changes that have taken place, trying to put it in a big picture of the tree of life even though that means humans really did evolve from some hominid line going back millions of years, and we for instance did NOT evolve from apes like a lot of people like to say as a way to dis the whole science.


Apes and humans came from a much earlier line that split off into the separate lines that includes apes, neandertals, Denisovans, and modern humans.
Till we find something different that is the standard line we will pitch.

We suspect life came from a mud puddle when it was hit by lightning just as one possible scenario and there are a lot of possible scenarios one of which could be interstellar clouds of organics raining down on early Earth bypassing the argument of your buddies lecturing on the subject which is there was not enough time to generate the complex stuff of life.

Another scenario is the idea of life in the solar system started on Mars before it ever happened on Earth, billions of years ago and Mars gets whacked a lot by meteors and asteroids and some of the bacteria and such surviving a trip through space by the ejecta, reaching Earth and seeding ITS live on Earth.

We know for instance that there are in fact meteorites on Earth that we know in fact came from Mars so it is not a huge stretch to see at least the possibility some of that material had bacteria surviving the thousands or millions of years between getting whacked on Mars to a piece of it falling on Earth.

And of COURSE we know these scenarios are just possibilities and the truth may be something completely unknown or perhaps it will be proven design was correct all along. If that is where the science leads us, so be it.

I myself will never believe life came from a 'goddidit' event till proven otherwise since there are literally THOUSANDS of OOL tales and in fact the 7 day creation tale is paved over Egyptian 7 day creation tale repaved for Jews and in fact a thousand years older than the Jewish tradition, repaved for the consumption of early Jews.

The odds of just one of those thousands of creation myths being true are very slim in my view, just statistically speaking looking that the whole lot of those kind of myths.

And of course you will feel otherwise, knowing YOUR particular creation myth is and always will be THE correct myth even though you never heard a god come down to you personally and tell you, here is how it all happened....

The whole age of Earth was not written in the bible but INFERRED by humans analyzing the Judy begat Roger who begat Billy who begat Mary who begat, who begat, etc., etc., etc.

The begat's listed are just taken as infallible which in my mind is just hogwash. There is no way in my view they could have recorded accurately such a lineage since the begat's were done over a very long time frame so in my view over the centuries people just put down the begat's as best as they could recollect and ran with it and now biblical literalists take that is if it were dictated by god and therefore infallible.
In my view that is total BS. They have to conflate the fact no god is around TODAY telling people who to attack and such but firmly believe such a god did in fact participate daily in the lives of people thousands of years ago but we see no such thing today.

If you think otherwise then you have to explain why for instance there are religions at each other's literal throat each one vowing to kill the other religions and there is no god coming down to settle the issue and in my view if we off ourselves in some war or some other set of circumstances causes humans to go extinct just like Neanderals went extinct, there will be no sad faced god either preventing it or crying over it.

We then will go the way of all life forms, we have a beginning as a species and will at some point in the future have an extinction and there is nothing humans can do about that but delay the situation.

If we are given the chance to get to other planets and such which will at least keep humans alive if Earth gets whacked by another asteroid that nearly wiped out life on Earth several times we already know about.

In that case if we have viable independent cities and colonies scattered even just around our own solar system that particular scenario won't off all humans and we go on and maybe that delays or demise by a million years, who knows but all this talk about what to do when the sun starts to run out of hydrogen and starts its inevitable expansion to perhaps the size of Earth's orbit and therefore burns our planet to a crisp, won't have much effect on humans since that is so far in the future even descendants of humans will be extinct.

I think it is just daydreaming to be thinking of ways to say move Earth out further to keep our planet in a liquid water zone.
We will be long gone by then.

@sonhouse said
I guess everyone has some form of bias but we have to look at them critically and decide whether it means anything in the large picture.

I am biased to believe science will grow and I figure that is based on what I see in the past and we can't see what new things will turn up but if you go to phys.org you see new findings every day which is why I say we will know more ab ...[text shortened]... ay move Earth out further to keep our planet in a liquid water zone.
We will be long gone by then.

I'm not sure what you mean by real evidence, you mean something you cannot dance around, or only those things that prove your point? For one I think the evidence we see in the here and now is enough to question the theory, nothing new needs to be added.

If you are stuck on I will never believe...what is the purpose of discussing anything, you've closed your mind to the possibility to being wrong?

If we have to have evidence break through our own bias that is saying something for either of us. We have to be willing to accept what we see does not fit our world views and force us to rethink what we know which is the large picture.

If we are willing to subject our world views to be critically examined by those that don't just agree with us that is going to be the only way we can be shown we are wrong. If we ONLY listen to those that agree with us there is no hope of changing our minds if we are not correct in how we are viewing the world.

My definition of faith is what I can trust and rely on, I'm pretty sure that isn't what you think when you say that word.

@kellyjay said
I'm not sure what you mean by real evidence,

Physical evidence that can be verified by observation and/or experiment as valid by other groups anywhere on modern Earth; Mere hearsay and claims made in mere stories don't count.