OT: Science Frauds and Hoaxes of the Modern World

Oh jeeze, don't stop there -- you left out evolution!

-Lasse

first. It is:

ust one brief view of it: I have heard supposedly intelligent PhD's say t hat "everything about us is determined by DNA." And VC's went along with t his hoax.

The Human Genome Project has been a spectacular success. Nobody with any se nse ever said that everything about us is determined by our DNA.

The adult phenome is what you get from the interaction between the genome a nd the environment while you are growing up. Twins have identical genomes, but since the environment for the dominant twin (who got a bigger share of the food supply in the womb) is different from that for the sub-ordinate tw in (who didn't) even their phenomes are subtly different.

If you knew what you were talking about, you'd be aware of the Human Proteo me Project,

which is about characterising all the proteins that the 20,300 human protei n-coding genes can make (which is a lot more than 20,300, since the same ge ne can be activated to make several different proteins, and the proteins ca n be modified after manufacture.

As does everybody else. You've set up a particularly moronic straw man argu ment.

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I'm sure that some con men did exactly that. Pointing out that the Human Ge nome Project has been exploited by con men falls short of demonstrating tha t the Human Genome Project is any kind of hoax. Con men have been selling t he Brooklyn Bridge since it was built, which doesn't make the bridge any ki nd of hoax.

Actually, every cancer originate in a genetically aberrant stem cell. Few o f those genetic aberrations are inherited, but sequencing cancer cells can be very informative.

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I'd suggest you learn a bit more about what you are complaining about.

And check your sources carefully. The well-funded campaign to sabotage any kind of effective response to anthropogenic global warming works by creatin g doubt about the results of scientific research.

The people who make lots of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selli ng it as fuel rely on the results of scientific research to let them find t he fossil carbon and extract it, but they want the general population to be more sceptical about the results of scientific research so that they can k eep on selling lots of fossil carbon as fuel for a few more years.

And Copernicanism.

Cheers

About evolution - the discovery of "jumping genes" (1) was suppressed, and as well, it doesn't explain "jumps" in progress of complexity. In the main I agree with it, but I should mention that Darwin despised the term "survival of the fittest." By fit, he meant that which "fit into the environmental forces," not "fittest and strongest." And...I should also mention the theory is all after the fact - it does not explain "what" happened, just the reason for it to happen. (survival and reproduction)

1. Barbara McClintock

Homeopathy - this is hilarious stuff:

Many flaming liberals, may not realize they are being used as a tool of moneyed interests. Getting rich and having grand ideas, however wrong, seem melded in the modern liberal mind like chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream. The backers of the HGP thought that they could patent the gene sequences responsible for various diseases. Then there was the cockamamie vision put forward that each of us would have a genetic profile on file, and that the doctor would then just squirt you full of an expensive drug to counteract the problem. This is just Progressive eugenics in a modern guise. Total idiocy. Yet the progressive scientists will hold on to their ideas like a political campaign or a dog eating foul meat with a growl.

Here is a contrast list between traditional "liberals" and modern Progressive scientists.

Liberal scientists: develop science, but have an open mind about it don't enrich themselves from it unless it comes from performance of it.

Progressive scientists: science as a political campaign - closed, bigoted mind enrich their egos and pocket-books through moneyed interests stick to positions as politics, not science

Various moneyed interests behind "science" today: Human Genome Project - VC's, Big Pharma, crony capitalists of government medicine global warming - government-sponsored scientists, the Saudi oil interests ...more

So, last year, 327 billion $ was spent on global warming research. That's BIG money, and the recipients will do anything to keep that money coming. Some of the engineers I used to work with - really vacuum system technicians - were installed in local colleges (Santa Clara College in Silicon Valley) as "Professors of Climate Change." The reason: thin film coatings are used for solar energy, as in "Solyndra," the fraudulent alternative energy project. These "Professors of Climate Change" don't know a thing about climatology, nor do they care. This is just the barest "ice above the water" of the massive fraudulent scam of climate change, formerly global warming. (1)

And addressed to the myriad phony scientists filling their pockets in these frauds: "And you, like a labor union thugs, will defend it to the death. Shame on you. At least let's not pretend this is science. This is crony capital politics, many are being used as their tools. "

================= (1) Al Gore filled his pockets with 200m of crony money. He pretended to start a TV channel about global warming, which would be a front for politics, but then sold it to Al Jazeera. An agile guy, that Gore.

On a deep level, yes, you could say that Copernicus had another side. As a scientist, of course he was "right." The Christian Bible put forward a belief that the earth is the center of the universe. Leonardo Da Vinci even said we were celestial beings living on a star, but I doubt he meant it literally.

But here's the rub: Is the Bible really a "scientific" document? Of course not, because science is mutable, and the Christian Church is mainly fundamentalist - ie scripture preserving. This is good and bad - it does preserve an original vision (you could argue), but it also inculcates a closed-mindedness.

Around the year 1500, we had an amazing number of social forces in play:

-invention of the printing press

-Protestantism

-the Renaissance (of Pagan Greece, to be precise)

-beginning of the scientific method (Bacon 1620)

-and...rebellion of lower classes, new world conquest, higher education, etc.

To cut to the chase, Copernicus was an example of comparing apples to oranges. The Bible is a purported document dealing with spiritual and ontological areas of consciousness. (along with its social rigidity) Copernicus was a proponent of the rise of scientific knowledge about matter (along with it's rigidity and ignorance of the ontological nature of consciousness.)

So, like many "revolutions," the Copernican one was largely about something else: the rise of independent thought in the 1500's. Because of the social rigidity of the Catholic Church, the Copernican theory made a splash in 1540 due to it's disproving of a Bible picture thousands of years old. I believe the Greeks had had a heliocentric theory as well.

But the problem with Copernicus is that it does not take account of the baby that is thrown out with the bath-water: the extra-corporeal nature of human beings. What the atheists are really saying about materialist science is "See, man is just a piece of matter without consequence, the science proves it. There is nothing beyond man that he is connected to or a part of. Life is without meaning."

And this is the Progressive view of things that is taught in schools today. Depressed? Take our SSRI's! What a mess! The rise of materialist science has created a false and destructive view of man.

So, in a very real sense, Copernicanism is wrong: human kind, and the concerns of the earth are at the center of our universe. To peer through a telescope and not develop a true connection with a higher power, s the plight of modern man.

d as well, it doesn't explain "jumps" in progress of complexity.

It wasn't suppressed, just ignored. In 1951 nobody had much of an idea how genes worked, and making sense out of what Barbara McClintock had found was n't easy.

After Watson and Crick, and a whole lot of subsequent work, it became easie r to recognise exactly what she had found, and she got a Nobel Prize for it in 1983.

It was never expected to explain "jumps" in the process of evolving more co mplicated organs, because biological orthodoxy is that there aren't any - i f you look hard enough you always seem to be able to find a sequence of pro gressively more complicated organs, each of which makes sense in the creatu re that had it.

e term "survival of the fittest." By fit, he meant that which "fit into the environmental forces," not "fittest and strongest."

The "social Darwinists" were a pretty unpleasant bunch. They added Darwin's theory to an existing bunch of nasty and brutish ideas and tried to use i t to justify the sort of political choices that the Tea Party would like.

At the time, biology was an observational science, and in all observational sciences, all theories are "after the fact". Stellar evolution, and heavy element synthesis in supernova's are equally "after the fact" but that does n't make them bad science.

You aren't a sceptic but rather an ignoramus, trying to put your own spin o n stuff that you don't actually understand.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2014 7:40:31 AM UTC-4, Kennedy wrote: snip

Yes, homeopathy is an obvious fraud, in the view of traditional science. There was a fellow in europe who claimed to have scientific proof for it, but he was faking data, as I remember. I had an acquaintance, a woman who lived to the age of 100. When she was alive, I looked at her vitamin shelf, and it was all homeopathy! Homeopathy may belong in the area of "higher placebo effect." The nurses study, a landmark lifestyle-health study, showed that friends are more important than even smoking! And other studies show church-going has a big effect.

Friends are more important than diet or anything else! Explain that, materialist scientists!

When I see things like that, I am hesitant to dismiss homeopathy completely. Freud said that the power of suggestion was the strongest psychological force. I am at a loss to explain the effect of friends.

You clearly haven't got a clue about the history of the Human Genome Project.

It seems to have come from US Department of Energy.

Some of the backers of the HGP may have thought that. James Watson (of Watson and Crick), who led the US NIH branch of the project from 1990 to 1992 famously resigned because he though that patenting existing gene sequences was a really bad idea.

Craig Venter and his firm Celera Genomics jumped on the bandwaggon a lot later with this idea in mind. When Clinton said they couldn't, in March 2000, the biotechnology sector lost $50 billion in market capitalisation in two days.

Most of the "progressive scientists" involved thought that patenting existing gene sequences was a very bad idea.

You really don't have a clue about the stuff you are talking about.

your case that I am an ignoramus is undercut by your frequent use of wikipedia! j

When you write that, I have no hesitation in dismissing you completely.

That is absolutely not true. The Bible says NOTHING on the arrangement of the solar system. What happened was that the Catholic church accepted large amounts of Aristotelian beliefs - including the shape/organization of the solar system. It was the ancient Greeks, not the Christians who put the earth at the center of the universe.

OK - interesting. So you could still say it was the Church's position. In any case, since the church interpreted the Bible, and no one read it, then the "picture" of the earth's place was joined at the hip with the Bible. My argument is primarily social - the power of the church vs. materialist science. In other words, what I was saying is that the rebellion against the church that has constituted materialist science - Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin - has been used as a general argument against the Bible. Because, if you begin to question the church's authority, then it's a short step to question the authority of scripture as well. As in, "If you were wrong about the solar system and life on the earth, why should we believe you about the Bible as well?" And that brings up the raft of Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi finds, and so forth. With all this, I do feel that there is a loss of the inner truth of man's existence.

I don't blame you! Homeopathy is a hard pill to swallow! But so are the health benefits of networks of friends!

Someone said that intelligence is the ability to hold two differing ideas in mind at the same time. In my defense, that is what I am forced to do in some cases. In the case of Homeopathy, I just keep an open mind. Quantum mechanics is a good example of what could be dismissed completely. It just violates ordinary principles of thought. It just rocks you back on your heels and forces you to admit your rational means of thought is worthless in some major respects.

It wasn't belief, it was the best science of the day. It was overturned by experimental observation (Galileo seeing the moons of Jupiter) and better theory. (Kepler, BTW, not Copernicus--C. just reformulated the Ptolemaic system to get rid of the one-year epicycle on all the outer planets.)

The other fun fact is that the classical/medieval view was that the Earth was where all the less desirable bits of the universe collected, due to being too gross to float in the ether. Sort of like a cosmic version of baseband. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

LIBERAL HOAX #3 - Carcinogens

I want to add the area of carcinogens in the environment. This piece of flim-flam is beloved of the government because they can "protect us" and make us passive in the face of a major threat. Centralized government is desperate to find a way to be useful, because it makes them look good, and maybe in some there is a twinge of guilt about their theft of money from the economy.

I mean, it is more attractive to say to your grand-children, "I helped save a million people from environment-caused cancer," than "I stole millions based on pure hokum, and now we have this nice house?"

The carcinogens hoax has been used to drive major parts of the US economy out of business - and to China. Examples abound, but nearly all our vitamins are made in China, because regulations have forced US manufacturers out of business, based on carcinogens and other myths.

The myth of carcinogens has been one of the more destructive of the modern scientific scams fostered by the government-academic complex.

Huh? Asbestos is nasty stuff.

George H.