Article review: Is science just fraud and feud? Is it anything but science?
And, is it as well so for the “reputed top” journal called the Science magazine?
This is just the cliched tip of the iceberg. Honest people in the sciences know this quite well, at least in their hearts.
Excerpts from the Atlantic article with brief comments:
“ She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs — and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact.”
They call this science: “Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz — death by boredom.”
‘Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams — it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote.’
Can belief be science? “In 1991, a crater on the Yucatán Peninsula was identified as the landing spot of the asteroid many believe killed the dinosaurs.”
‘“Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”’
Do you see the similarity with the Left-(il)liberals? ‘She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”’
“This dispute illuminates the messy way that science progresses, and how this idealized process, ostensibly guided by objective reason and the search for truth, is shaped by ego, power, and politics.”
‘Three hundred thousand years before Alvarez’s asteroid struck, some foram populations had already started to decline. Keller found that they had become less and less robust until, very rapidly, about a third of them vanished. “My takeaway was that you could not have a single instantaneous event causing this pattern,” she told me… Keller said she barely got through her introduction before members of the audience tore into her: “Stupid.” “You don’t know what you’re doing.” “Totally wrong.” “Nonsense.”’
“Alvarez had set the tone… he had wielded his star power to mock, malign, and discredit opponents who dared to contradict him… wrote off the entire discipline of palaeontology when specialists protested that the fossil record contradicted his theory.”
Scientists who dissented from the asteroid hypothesis feared for their careers.
“Science, a top academic journal, had become biased. The journal reportedly published 45 pieces favorable to the impact theory during a 12-year period — but only four on other hypotheses. (The editor denied any favoritism.)”
Like politics in India Science in the West is a family business? “After Alvarez’s death, in 1988, his acolytes took up the fight — most notably his son and collaborator, Walter”.
‘Various scientists told me, on the record, that they consider her “fringe,” “unethical,” “particularly dishonest,” and “a gadfly.”’
‘Keller listed numerous research papers whose early drafts had been rejected, she felt, because pro-impact peer reviewers “just come out and regurgitate their hatred.”’
‘Over and over, Keller saw “no evidence of a sudden mass killing.” Instead, she found more proof that the Earth’s fauna grew progressively more distressed starting 300,000 years before the extinction.’
“And then there was the issue of the four previous mass extinctions. None appeared to have been triggered by an impact, although numerous other asteroids have pummelled our planet over the millennia.”
“Keller concluded that the asteroid had hit 200,000 years before the extinction — far too early to have caused it.”
“The Earth’s four prior mass extinctions are each associated with enormous volcanic eruptions that lasted about 1 million years apiece. The fifth extinction, the one that doomed the dinosaurs, occurred just as one of the largest volcanoes in history seethed in the Deccan Traps.”
“…the biggest Deccan eruptions — accounting for nearly half of the volcanoes’ explosive output — had been squeezed into the last 60,000 years before the mass extinction.”
“The pinkish soil above that had been buried under lava — the brown rocks covered with tangled roots. Since the pinkish layer and the shells predated the flows, they could help pinpoint that particular eruption.”
India-bashing Westerners and their apes in India should read this. “In her teens, Keller resolved to die before she turned 23. She was suicidal for reasons she declined to explain to me in detail, but attributed generally to frustration with Swiss society — her sense that “options were limited for a kid from a poor family,” plus “the sexual harassment” and “the way women were treated.” “You were just a piece of meat at any time,” she told me.”
The Western origin of slavery and indentured labour — all evil points West. “When Keller disembarked, an Australian official tried to steer her to a sweatshop crammed with immigrants at sewing machines, attempting to negotiate a cut of Keller’s pay, in perpetuity. But Keller spoke better English than the official realized. She discovered the plan, threatened to report the official, and worked instead as a nurse’s aide, then a waitress.”
Why not the Indian sepoys and the apes of the West taste this ahimsa of the West firsthand and then talk? ‘She was returning from a picnic near Sydney’s Suicide Cliffs one day when a bank robber, fleeing the scene of the crime, shot her, puncturing her lungs, shattering her ribs, and landing her in intensive care… A priest came to administer last rites and, as Keller hovered in and out of consciousness, commanded her to confess her sins. Twice, she refused. “I credit that priest with my survival, because he made me so mad,” Keller told me. The experience also cured her of her death wish.’
‘Rather, they illuminate life’s fundamental questions. “Ask yourself, ‘Where did you come from?’ ‘Why are we here?’ ” Keller told me.’
Is not the name “Mahabaleshwar” so apt? How can so many (hundreds, if not thousands) insightful aspects of Hinduism be dismissed as just coincidence? “…three hours in the car to trace the lava flows from some of their farthest, flattest reaches back to some of their highest points, in Mahabaleshwar, a vertiginous town crowded with honeymooners. Mountains of basalt 2.1 miles high — nearly twice as tall as the Grand Canyon is deep — extended as far as I could see. Even the geologists, who had visited the Deccan Traps multiple times before, gaped at the landscape.”
Will the Indian apes of the West deny Bharat’s natural history too? ‘“The eruptions really took off. Huge. Absolutely huge. That’s when we have the longest lava flows on Earth, into the Bay of Bengal” — more than 600 miles away, practically the length of California.’
“Rocks elsewhere in the world support the sequence of events Keller has discerned in the Deccan Traps. She and her collaborators have found evidence of climate change and skyrocketing mercury levels following the largest eruptions, and other researchers have documented elevated concentrations of sulphur and chlorine consistent with severe pollution by volcanic gases. Keller posits that even the iridium layers could be linked to Deccan’s eruptions, given that volcanic dust can carry high concentrations of the element.”
“The greatest area of consensus between the volcanists and the impacters seems to be on what insults to sling.”’
‘“It’s not science. It sometimes seems to border on religious fervor, basically,” says Keller, whose work Smit calls “barely scientific.”’
This will apply to the Left-(il)liberals of India and the global racists of the Aryan-migration myth (AMM): “It is tempting, but unreliable, to trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Forty-one co-authors signed on to a 2010 Science paper asserting that Chicxulub was, after all the evidence had been evaluated, conclusively to blame for the dinosaurs’ death. Case closed, again. Although some might consider this proof of consensus, dozens of geologists, paleontologists, and biologists wrote in to the journal contesting the paper’s methods and conclusions. Science is not done by vote.”
Science is not done by vote.
Ultimately, consensus may be the wrong goal.
So much for impassioned rationalism of the sciences. Ahem. “Though trading insults is not the mark of dispassionate scientific research, perhaps detached investigation is not ideal, either. It is passion, after all, that drives scientists to dig deeper, defy the majority”.
What the hell is the problem with these moronic (non-)scientists? Why cannot they be just dispassionate about the various possible hypotheses, look at the evidence, agree on facts, discard non-facts, and move on to the next big thing? Their job is not to emotionally cling on to their first guess, is it?
The state of affairs today. ‘Keller’s vision of the sixth extinction, given what she sees as its parallels with Deccan volcanism, suggests that the end will be drawn out and difficult to recognize as such within humans’ brief conception of time. “We are living in the middle of a mass extinction today,” Keller told me. “But none of us feel that urgency, or that it really is so.”’
Will the apes of the west and the self-loathing sepoys listen? ‘“Well, we were stupid and killed ourselves. On a grand scale,” Keller said. “You rule the world, and then you die.”’
