NEWS: Beauty NOT in the Eye of the Beholder

Creation scientists don't consider themselves anti-science. Some of them have science degrees.

Big effing whoop.

They exhibit the same characteristics you do. That is, dismissing and deriding scientific work that conflicts with their pre-determined value system and intellectual prejudices.

Sorry? You're sufficiently expert that you know these studies are badly designed, er, why, exactly?

One of the things that's very clear from our earlier discussion is you weren't even prepared to read a copious amount of evidence that I presented to you there. You dismissed a whole active area of research across a number of disciplines, by leading scholars, without reading it, without even thinking about it, and now you're trying to pass off such glib anti-intellectualism as somehow you knowing better than everyone else from the outset that it'll all baloney?

Pardon me if I think you're full of it on this score.

I wouldn't have, if Scopitone hadn't noted your name.

You have a proven track record of making a series of loud assertions in threads, and then running off if the issue gets too complex. Sorry to be the one to bring it up, but really...

The majority of people here are stupid perverts?

I’m still in horrified awe of the people that refuse to believe the findings in this study. Aside from all the facts, it just seems like common sense to me. Fuck, if it were that stupid study where people thought having kids listen to Mozart made them smarter, I would understand it. That was one of those times where people took a study and interpreted the results for their own purposes and used it as a way to make money.

WHO is making money off of this study?

The white capitalist patriarchy, foo'.

You need to stop baggin' on ugly people on this site! It was cute at first but your unholy crusade against "The Unwashed" has gone beyond the borders of civility and shot up to Thunderdome levels! Nay DEATHRACE 2000 LEVELS!!

I’m onto you and your sick game ends NOW!

What the hell are you talking about?

In the TMC thread I linked to four books, summarising many many studies, and at the end of the thread I added a 5th that I'd just found.

When I linked to these and said "read the evidence", you said "No."

It wasn't "No, I don't have time now, but maybe later."

It wasn't even "No, look, I'm not interested, and so I guess I don't really have anything to say about this kind of work."

It was "No, I'm not interested, because they're bound to be wrong or meaningless."

You were unprepared to do the reading but you were prepared to dismiss it out of hand.

This is textbook anti-intellectualism.

One final thing. Let's not point fingers about proving intellects online, or who is or isn't prone to be a little bit passionate/obsessive in arguments. I argue passionately about stuff I feel strongly about and know something about. So do you (except I'd question how much you know on some of the things you argue about, but that's what I'm addressing above). Neither of us has clean hands in the intensity-of-argument stakes, that's for sure.

Look at reprobate and stockula in CE. Both zealous, passionate, and a little bit obsessive. One of them checks his facts scrupulously and understands the key paradigms of the issues he's debating. The other throws around glib assertions and wanders off when the going gets tough.

Pick your role model.

Wow. I have been through the back and forth arguments so so many times on so many issues on this site. Good lucks guys, I know how both of you feel - Morgan & TheFuckOffKid. And I have been on this site since a month after it began under different screen names. Though in the past, I have rarely if ever disagreed much with Morgan, I have disagreed with TheFuckOffKid on a few occasions. Both of you are intelligent, neither should be downing the other, and I don't think Morgan acts like Stockula. And both of you have to admit that internet discussions can get fucked up, because when you feel passionate about something and a group or individual attacks you for your stance, it can be very very frustrating. But debate is good for anyone who wants to really know a subject, because challenges from all sides will make you dig deeper. And this is wonderful, as long as you don't lost so much time on here when you could be doing something more useful in reality. So there is also, nothing wrong with someone saying "Fuck it. Agree to disagree.". Yeah, that might mean that the subject won't go as deep as it should, but people have lives, and short ones at that. So as long as a person keeps a balance, their is no blame there.

Morgan, I don't really want to turn this thread into the TFOK-versus-Morgan show, so what I want to do is clarify a few misconceptions, and then I'll post another more general post that I will make an effort to present as NOT a direct attack on you.

This is a moot point now, I guess, but I'm sure you couldn't find studies contradicting or refuting the general tenor of the evidence of the studies I'm talking about. If such studies were there I'm pretty sure I'd have encountered them by now.

What you COULD find is plenty of studies showing the importance of acculturation and the effects of socialisation. Those don't contradict or refute evidence of biological determinants (as presented in my links), unless you insist on making a biology-versus-culture (nature versus nurture) distinction, i.e. you believe that they are mutually exclusive explanations, and we must choose between them.

I'd never argue that one paradigm trumps the other; I think we need to understand both. But the tendency for cultural essentialists to want to deny/override biology completely is something I'll discuss in the following post.

Again a moot point, but we don't disagree, at least not the way you seem to think. You are refusing to discuss evidence you have not evaluated, let alone comprehended. This is not a disagreement over the validity of the science; it's a disagreement over the validity of scientific method.

We can't disagree about the conduct or implications of the studies because you're refusing to even consider taking them seriously. You're arguing your position from ignorance.

I'm similarly confident that you didn't say that, and that I never said you said that. If there's somewhere where I accused you of accusing researchers of lying, let me know, and I'll retract such a claim here.

Which is where I note again that, while a fair question, the way to answer it is not to NOT read the research and "stand by" some pre-set ideological principle that tells you not to read research when you might be troubled by its implications. The way to answer your question is to witness the congruence of results in a variety of fields, not least biology, medicine and psychology. When experiments of hormone injections in lab animals reveal something in terms of behaviour, and statistically significant differences emerge in babies exposed to different amounts of testosterone that affects their brain structure (and later behaviour), then you start thinking that maybe testosterone does SOMETHING, and so maybe biology has SOME impact, and maybe just knee-jerkingly denying this isn't really a scholarly approach. Just one example among very many.

Sure, but that's one part of a much larger research agenda. And the research agenda collectively stands or falls together. I don't mean the details and the individual results, which evolve with more evidence. I mean the overall research agenda and strategy, and the kinds of answers that are being found via various methods and over various disciplines.

The agenda can be expressed as:

What are the biological influencees on human behaviour (if any)?

It can alternately be expressed as:

What are the implications of Darwin's theories of natural selection for human behaviour?

Whether it's to do with the evolution of the two sexes, or how we are stimulated visually, or different strategies in competition for mates, or a whole host of other particular questions, the general agenda for research is as I've outlined above. Dismissing part of it purely on principle is in fact tantamout to saying the whole agenda is unworthwhile or misplaced.

And you apparently never will, because you apparently will continue to not study the research in question, which would help show you how such influences can be disentangled.

Like what? That you claimed scientists are liars? It's ok, I never said that.

OK, I'm going to post something more general about why these kinds of arguments seem to make me a get a little more ... intense than usual.

These aren't arguments about particular pieces of academic research. If they were, we could just argue away about the details (although realistically most people at this site would be barely guessing about the nature of the work in the first place).

This is actually one aspect of what sometimes gets cutely dubbed "The Science Wars".

The "Science Wars" refer to academic/cultural battles about the ability of science to tell us anything useful about the world and about ourselves. While the social impact of science has long been debated, the latest bout in the "Science Wars" stems from the 1960s and follows the line of argument that science does not discover anything resembling truth, it simply constructs what we then call truth according to an overriding social discourse.

Short (very potted and simplified) history:
- the 1960s were an era where it was believed that wide-ranging social change was possible -- that we could become "anything we wanted to become" as people and as a society
- the academic underpinning for this came from a group of continental (mainly French) theorists in what is now generally referred to as the "postmodern turn"
- these various theorists, taken collectively, were arguing that reality was a social construct rather than an objective "thing", and that the social construction was the result of political forces, and could not be analysed in the absence of said social/political forces.
- these ideas spread into the English speaking world rapidly, and came to dominate the intellectual discourse of many humanities disciplines, to the point where it would be hard to pass a humanities degree, let alone get a teaching job in one, without plenty of talk about meta-narratives, social discourses, and lots of name dropping of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and others.
- the formal introduction of feminism into the academy via creation of Women's Studies and Gender Sutdies departments and programs coincided with this era, and leading intellectual "feminist theorists" (Cixous, Butler, etc.) were in this tradition.

The "Science Wars" comes out of this. If everything is just a discourse, driven by dominant power structures and the social discourses they create, then what we call science is just one more power-laden social discourse that humanities academics can "deconstruct".

If (like me) you're on the side of science, broadly speaking, then you can recognise and accept that the activity of science is a human endeavour, with all the flaws and biases that any human endeavour can have. But that is NOT the same as saying the results of science are simply subjective. Bad scientific results appear, including biased science and outright fraud. But bad science (if science has any intrinsic merit) can't last the distance. It gets exposed and refuted by better science.

Scientists have fought back, with books like Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. As a result, the cultural critics fought back with, for example, a special edition of the journal Social Text in 1996, devoted to further exploration and criticism of the science establishment. This featured mostly contributions from the "human sciences" (e.g. anthropology), but the longest and most ambitious was by Alan Sokal, respected NYU physicist, who wrote a piece called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'".

The editors LOVED Sokal's contribution. A respected and rigorous scientists writing an article that mixed quantum mechanics, high level mathematics, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, even film studies ... who wouldn't love it?

Until it was exposed as a joke, that is. Here is Sokal talking about the implications of what is now known as the Sokal Hoax.

Sokal's hoax has taken the wind out of some of the sails of the cultural critics of science. But not all. There is still a tendency for humanities (and some social science) programs to inculcate the view that science is ONLY a value-laden discourse, one that has no real claims to making "truth claims".

Let's take the vexed issue of feminists and biology. Feminists trained in the (continental) tradition I've noted above are in a long line of feminists who reject the idea that anything about human behaviour can be explained by anything biological. To them, gender is purely socially constructed, there's nothing biologically different about men and women at all except some slight differences in our plumbing, and that all observed differences can be explained by how we're reared.

Now, ok, that's a hypothesis. In principle, a testable hypothesis. We can evaluate this.

Actually, it turns out, no we can't. People holding this view won't let us test this hypothesis. Now of course, they can't physically prevent research being conducted on whether and where biology matters. What they can do, though, is consistently, nigglingly, repeatedly attempt to discredit it. As in, it's meaningless, the experiments are badly designed, how can we expect to be able to separate out the various effects, how can we isolate the effects of cultural conditioning that start from birth, how can we remove the value-laden assumptions and processes of patriarchally trained scientists?

These are reasonable questions AS LONG AS THEY'RE ASKED WITH THE IDEA THAT REASONABLE ANSWERS MAY BE PROVIDED. They are, however, not asked with that intent. They are asked wirth the intent of shutting down the discussion.

Take a look at a recent journal entry where I discussed a relevant book on this kind of research. From here I happened to get involved in a lengthy to-and-fro with a lovely SG member named beta. Most of the exchange occurred on the subsequent journal entry. Notice how it proceeded.

*Her: I haven't read the book, but I tend to think anthropological and sociliological explanations are superior to biological ones. There's no real biological evidence.
*Me: You should read the book. He cites lots of evidence. And anyway, I wouldn't priovilege one kid of argument over another. Surely they both have relevance.
*Her: I still think the cultural line of argument works better.
*Me: But you haven't read the book.
*Her: Yes, I've ADMITTED several times to not having read the book! But biology is something we invented, after all, so cultural explanations must dominate.
*Me: You dismiss that there's biological evidence without reading the book. You keep saying one kind of paradigm must dominate another paradigm when it's clearly NOT what I'm arguing. What's going on here?
*Her: Now you're being argumentative.



See any similarities with tactics adopted in this thread?

So.

I get worked up because this is NOT a debate about science or particular experiments or whatever. It's a systematic political attempt to shut down scientific discourse; to make certain kinds of views palatable and others unpalatable by repeated dismissal, denial, sneer and assertion.

Yes, that gets me a tad annoyed. Sue me.

Or if you think cultural essentialism really rocks, go here and tell me why, in very careful detail. I promise I'll listen. That's what scholars (even amateurs) do.

Yea that's it