Science Denial Runs Red and Blue

Oneuli said:
I didn't say a thing about Jenner. I'm addressing the clearly incorrect statement that sex is binary. It's not. That science denial runs strong among right-wingers.... much the same as denial of anthropogenic climate, denial of evolution, young-earth creationism, and a tendency to deny the reality of just about any statistical evidence that doesn't fit with received prejudices.
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Well as an individual with no political bias towards the Transgendered who has a graduate education in human biology I'm telling you that the biological sciences do not support such a conclusion. For the vast majority of humans sex and gender are a binary phenotype. Rare exceptions do exist but they are just exactly that. Rare.
 
anonymoose said:
So far so good.No, a theory is attained through repeated testing with predictable results, not a consensus. There is no mention of 'consensus' needed to attain a theory in the Scientific Method. Repeated testing with rigourous scrutiny results in... repeated testing with rigourous scrutiny. That's sounds like experimental testing to be published. Nothing more.
Let's take the Theory of Evolution as an example of a scientific theory.
Evolution is proven repeatedly by carbon dated fossiles and corroborated by DNA testing. It goes beyond a "general agreement of a belief stronger than impression and less strong than positive knowledge" (definition of 'consensus'). Evolution biologists do not even question the Theory of Evolution. They are unanimous in agreement.
No. See above.^ That's one possible path to a consensus but not the only one. E.g., a consensus could be attained at a conference of scientists.
.
So even GreenFacts deems scientific expertise is lacking when 'consensus' is used.That's an opinion disputed by other climate scientists. Personally I don't know.
I don't think the 'consensus' is way off the mark one way or another. Like I said, I don't know. I do know this... I've never seen a published scientific paper with the conclusion that humans are the main cause of so called climate change. Never. Not one.
I'll give another example of a consensus that has never been proven.
There's a consensus that dental amalgam is harmful to human health because it's made of an alloy with mercury as an ingrediant. Everybody knows mercury is poisonous.
The problem with the consensus is that there has never been a study published with the conclusion that dental amalgam is harmful. Never. Not one.
Now I wouldn't eat dental amalgam for breakfast but I'd have no problem with it being used as a dental restoration.No. It's right.
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Not going to use my time to respond comprehensively to this word salad.

Your opinion about scientific consensus is wrong. I work directly with scientists, aka ecologists, earth scientists, oceanographers, geophysicists who know what scientific consensus is, what it represents, and the role it plays in advancing human knowledge.

I really can't spend the time in a futile effort to convince an obscure message board poster that they do not have a clear understanding of the role and significance of professional consensus.
 
Superfreak said:
No, try reading the sources for the 97%. Clearly all you have read is 97% agree! and that is enough for you.

Again, the VAST majority did not take a position on man being the primary driver of warming.
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The right-wingers have been told repeatedly by their handlers that the 97% figure is based on a single study that looked at the question of what percent of papers that have taken a position on climate change took the mainstream position. What those wing-nut propaganda sites don't tell them, though, is that's just one of many different studies, each using different methods, each of which comes to a pretty similar number.

Specifically, the talking point the right-wing sources have told their minions to parrot is in response to a research paper by Cook. But there's also a landmark study by Doran & Zimmerman that found a 97% consensus among active climate researchers, and there's an Anderegg study that found over 97% of climate experts who'd supported or rejected the existence human-caused global warming had come down on the supporting side, and there's an Oreskes study that found no rejections of the climate consensus among 928 study abstracts, and so on. There's also a 100% consensus among the 33 national academies of sciences that have taken a position -- which includes all the major academies.

Depending on the exact way you ask the questions, and the exact group of scientists you're asking (e.g., are you sticking to tar-sands petroleum geologists in Alberta, or leading global geophysicists and climatologists?), the numbers can come out different. But, the general picture is this:

(1) A large percentage of experts agree with the IPCC position in its broad outlines,
(2) Agreement is higher the more expert the group you're consulting (e.g., higher among climatologists than meteorologists, and higher among people with advanced educations than people with no education past high school).
(3) Agreement has been growing more common over time among scientists.

So, whether we say the consensus is 91%, 97%, or 100%, it's certainly more than strong enough that any reasonable person regards it as sufficient basis for setting policy with the assumption the consensus is more or less correct:

330px-Cook_et_al._%282016%29_Studies_consensus.jpg
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yet for the vast majority it is
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The vast majority are either XX or XY, but even within those groups, there is vast variation from one person to the next as to how various hormonal and physiological sexual characteristics manifest, so even there, it's not a binary.
For example, consider so-called "bitch tits." There's not a clear-cut line where pudgy pecs become clinical gynomastia. Similarly, there's no clear-cut line where you go from having a woman who has to wax her lip more often than most, to a full-fledged "bearded woman." With every primary and secondary sexual characteristic you care to name, there's a range of measurements -- e.g., levels of testosterone, number of gonads of each type, natural vocal pitch, and so on.

The point, though, is that it's not a binary, and yet many feel the need to pretend it is, despite the science, for political reasons. They're more likely to be conservatives.
 
Cypress said:
Not going to use my time to respond comprehensively to this word salad.

Your opinion about scientific consensus is wrong. I work directly with scientists, aka ecologists, earth scientists, oceanographers, geophysicists who know what scientific consensus is, what it represents, and the role it plays in advancing human knowledge.

I really can't spend the time in a futile effort to convince an obscure message board poster that they do not have a clear understanding of the role and significance of professional consensus.
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LMAO at the extreme appeal to authority. Poor lil leg humping rape apologist always responds like this when his two brain cells can't spark an original thought.
 
Oneuli said:
The right-wingers have been told repeatedly by their handlers that the 97% figure is based on a single study that looked at the question of what percent of papers that have taken a position on climate change took the mainstream position. What those wing-nut propaganda sites don't tell them, though, is that's just one of many different studies, each using different methods, each of which comes to a pretty similar number.

Specifically, the talking point the right-wing sources have told their minions to parrot is in response to a research paper by Cook. But there's also a landmark study by Doran & Zimmerman that found a 97% consensus among active climate researchers, and there's an Anderegg study that found over 97% of climate experts who'd supported or rejected the existence human-caused global warming had come down on the supporting side, and there's an Oreskes study that found no rejections of the climate consensus among 928 study abstracts, and so on. There's also a 100% consensus among the 33 national academies of sciences that have taken a position -- which includes all the major academies.

Depending on the exact way you ask the questions, and the exact group of scientists you're asking (e.g., are you sticking to tar-sands petroleum geologists in Alberta, or leading global geophysicists and climatologists?), the numbers can come out different. But, the general picture is this:

(1) A large percentage of experts agree with the IPCC position in its broad outlines,
(2) Agreement is higher the more expert the group you're consulting (e.g., higher among climatologists than meteorologists, and higher among people with advanced educations than people with no education past high school).
(3) Agreement has been growing more common over time among scientists.

So, whether we say the consensus is 91%, 97%, or 100%, it's certainly more than strong enough that any reasonable person regards it as sufficient basis for setting policy with the assumption the consensus is more or less correct:

330px-Cook_et_al._%282016%29_Studies_consensus.jpg
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LMAO... try reading the wording. Again, there is a difference between saying humans are effecting the climate and saying humans are the primary driver of the change in climate due to greenhouse gasses.

As you indicated above... wording matters.

That is like saying '99% of people believe the earth has warmed over the last 40 years' and then stating 'anyone who disagrees that man is the primary driver is ignoring the fact that 99% agree the earth is warming'

It is word games. When you start having 'scientists' yell 'deniers!'... you can bet that 'scientist' doesn't want his/her methods to be looked at very closely... unless of course it is by like minded parrots.
 
Oneuli said:
The vast majority are either XX or XY, but even within those groups, there is vast variation from one person to the next as to how various hormonal and physiological sexual characteristics manifest, so even there, it's not a binary.
For example, consider so-called "bitch tits." There's not a clear-cut line where pudgy pecs become clinical gynomastia. Similarly, there's no clear-cut line where you go from having a woman who has to wax her lip more often than most, to a full-fledged "bearded woman." With every primary and secondary sexual characteristic you care to name, there's a range of measurements -- e.g., levels of testosterone, number of gonads of each type, natural vocal pitch, and so on.

The point, though, is that it's not a binary, and yet many feel the need to pretend it is, despite the science, for political reasons. They're more likely to be conservatives.
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For example trumps bizarre toadstool penis and single nad.
 
Superfreak said:
Please link us up to your basic science reference regarding the Y chromosome containing almost no genetic information. Been a few decades since my last class, but there were thought to be about 50-60 million base pairs in the Y chromosome of human DNA back in the day. That has changed???
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Much of human DNA is junk. There is little genetic information in the Y chromosome itself. It signals changes elsewhere.

Obviously if this were not true, hormones would have no effect. If the growth of breasts were genetically encoded and only present in women, how could estrogen have any effect on the growth of breasts in males? They would have no genetic code for breasts.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Well as an individual with no political bias towards the Transgendered who has a graduate education in human biology I'm telling you that the biological sciences do not support such a conclusion. For the vast majority of humans sex and gender are a binary phenotype. Rare exceptions do exist but they are just exactly that. Rare.
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As discussed above, even for those who fit within relatively arbitrary phenotype definitions, there's a spectrum of variation. It's a bit like setting a definition of "red" at arbitrary high and low frequency thresholds in the spectrum of visible light. You can define that as red and then say color is binary -- that something is either red or it isn't red. But that's a definitional game, rather than a necessary consequence of physics. Within "red," there's a spectrum, and there are points in the "red" and "non-red" category that are closer to each other than they are to other points in their respective categories.

It may be easier to think of if you look at hormones besides sex hormones. For example, consider insulin insensitivity. That's not binary. It's not like one day you're 100% sensitive to insulin, and the next day you're not. It's a spectrum of growing insensitivity. Similarly, androgen insensitivity is a spectrum. There's full androgen insensitivity, partial, and minimal. And even those are arbitrary categories and would include a spectrum within them as well. There are likely levels of androgen insensitivity that are so minimal that it wouldn't even be recognized as an example of the syndrome, and the person might go through life not even realizing he suffered from it, with no symptoms other than having a somewhat "girly" appearance and low sperm counts.

For some reason, many people, especially on the right, get really uncomfortable about the FACT of sex being non-binary, but science is science and the discomfort doesn't alter it.
 
anonymoose said:
Not me, but yes. Absolutely. Read The Selfish Gene, The Ancestor's Tale and The Greatest Show on Earth, all by Richard Dawkins. He brings it all together but they're long reads and pretty dry IMO. I learned a lot from reading them although much of The Ancestor's Tale is a repeat.
Every time I read one of his books I'm amazed at how much knowledge is packed into them with tons of footnotes for reference.
Basically the fossil record affirms the DNA evidence and vice versa. They cross reference each other.
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I’ve read Darwin’s book. It was tedious lol. The Descent of Man is on my bucket list since he expounds on his theory in it.

The Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinski is a good book if you want to entertain some good skeptical arguments against the theory.

It’s always good to look at both sides.
 
Clearly people fixate on what they personally want to believe. Vax and GMO being excellent examples.
But right on the money that it cuts across all lines.
 
Oneuli said:
As discussed above, even for those who fit within relatively arbitrary phenotype definitions, there's a spectrum of variation. It's a bit like setting a definition of "red" at arbitrary high and low frequency thresholds in the spectrum of visible light. You can define that as red and then say color is binary -- that something is either red or it isn't red. But that's a definitional game, rather than a necessary consequence of physics. Within "red," there's a spectrum, and there are points in the "red" and "non-red" category that are closer to each other than they are to other points in their respective categories.

It may be easier to think of if you look at hormones besides sex hormones. For example, consider insulin insensitivity. That's not binary. It's not like one day you're 100% sensitive to insulin, and the next day you're not. It's a spectrum of growing insensitivity. Similarly, androgen insensitivity is a spectrum. There's full androgen insensitivity, partial, and minimal. And even those are arbitrary categories and would include a spectrum within them as well. There are likely levels of androgen insensitivity that are so minimal that it wouldn't even be recognized as an example of the syndrome, and the person might go through life not even realizing he suffered from it, with no symptoms other than having a somewhat "girly" appearance and low sperm counts.

For some reason, many people, especially on the right, get really uncomfortable about the FACT of sex being non-binary, but science is science and the discomfort doesn't alter it.
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It’s good to know I’m 100% male lol!
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Yet for the vast majority it is. Reconcile this with the facts as they are known. Also, even with the genetic mosaics you're pointing out...for the large majority of those with these anomolous expression...their sex and gender identity are binary. Please reconcile this too. Then also take into account the affect that hormones have in development of sex and gender identity and explain why for the overwhelming majority sex and gender are binary?

Sure there are rare exception to our phenotype....but they are exactly that...exceptions.
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We are finding that the exceptions are much less rare than we had that, and phenotypical expression as the other gender mentally is fairly common regardless of chromosomes, due to the failure of the gender signalling mechanisms to successfully control it.

Gender supremacy like you subscribe to is a pseudoscientific ideology with no support from the scientific consensus.
 
Hello anonymoose,

anonymoose said:
I find that most on the left do not understand this but believe that "consensus " is proof ...
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I believe your perception is inaccurate.

Deniers are always demanding proof. Evidence is offered but not generally claimed to be proof. It is the demand for proof which is absurd. Especially when waiting for proof could be waiting too late to take appropriate measures.

Simply the possibility that we might affect our climate, coupled with the likely need that we should do so are enough for us to take the very wise precaution of trying to manage it.

It's called hoping for the best while being prepared for the worst. You're covered either way. Your way, if we guessed wrong we're screwed. Our way, we have at least done everything we can do. Worst case is we got more efficient with energy and got less pollution. Besides. New technology creates new jobs.
 
Oneuli said:
The vast majority are either XX or XY, but even within those groups, there is vast variation from one person to the next as to how various hormonal and physiological sexual characteristics manifest, so even there, it's not a binary.
For example, consider so-called "bitch tits." There's not a clear-cut line where pudgy pecs become clinical gynomastia. Similarly, there's no clear-cut line where you go from having a woman who has to wax her lip more often than most, to a full-fledged "bearded woman." With every primary and secondary sexual characteristic you care to name, there's a range of measurements -- e.g., levels of testosterone, number of gonads of each type, natural vocal pitch, and so on.

The point, though, is that it's not a binary, and yet many feel the need to pretend it is, despite the science, for political reasons. They're more likely to be conservatives.
Click to expand...
I'm fairly liberal and I'm a biologist. Though intersex births do occur, they are rare, less than 1% of births. It is the consensus that these intersex births are anomalous. They are atypical. They are rare occurences. We also know that gender identity is not a social construct. The body of evidence points to the fact that a persons gender identity, whether they subjectively feel male or female, is the result of prenatal hormonal exposure. What you're attempting to define as a mosaic of traits are natural variations within a phenotype, that individual, for the vast majority of persons, sex and gender are binary. They are either male or female. That's a largely agreed upon fact, free of political bias, that is easily observable.

This "mosaic"argument is weak, cherry picks it's information and down plays the obvious, such as that despite natural phenotypical variation, that the sex of that person is still homologous as male or female for the vast majority of people. That is, it's binary. That's really the big huge hole in the non-binary arguments. You can't explain away these homologies with phenotypical variation.
 
And then there are the little girls who turn into boys at puberty.

They are called Guevedoce.

"Puberty can be an awkward time for anybody, but spare a thought for the Guevedoce children of the Dominican Republic, who literally appear to change their sex when they hit adolescence.

As covered by Michael Mosley in the 2015 BBC series, Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You, the remarkable case of the Guevedoces is a condition that affects just over 1 percent of the boys born in Salinas, a remote village lying in the southwest of the Dominican Republic.

Guevedoces (literal translation "penis at 12") - who are also called "machihembras", meaning "first a woman, then a man" - appear to be completely female at birth and are brought up to be little girls.

"When they're born, they look like girls with no testes and what appears to be a vagina," wrote Mosley for The Telegraph back in 2015. "It is only when they near puberty that the penis grows and testicles descend."

After the developments of puberty, Guevedoces grow up to be fully functional males in their society, although some telltale signs do give away their unique biological heritage.

"Apart from being slightly undersized, everything works and the Guavadoces normally live out their lives as men," wrote Mosley, "albeit with wispy beards and small prostates.""

In This Remote Village, Some Boys Don't Grow a Penis Until They're 12

Must be pretty awkward for Christianity to deal with this. Would bathroom laws force these men to use the women's bathrooms for life because that's what they were identified as upon birth?

"The condition is not isolated to just the Dominican Republic, it's also been observed in Turkey and New Guinea."
 
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