Subsequently, Laura Helmuth disavowed her screed and vitriol. Unfortunately, it is a sign that too many scientists would rather offer elitist insults then address reasonable concerns and different ideas.
I have been following Scientific American’s steady decline, both in terms of its handling of science and its actual support of policies helpful to this nation.
A few of my recent articles show that progressive ideology has pretty much captured this once-respected publication.
- Scientific American Article Claims There’s No Difference Between Male, Female Athletes
- Scientific American Covers Itself with Shame Again, This Time by Using Term ‘Birthing Parent’
- Scientific American is Now the Bud Light of Science Journals
- Scientific American Colludes with Other Major Media to Normalize ‘Climate Emergency’ Terminology
One of the primary reasons this descent into madness has accelerated is that the editor-in-chief, Laura Helmuth, has allowed pseudoscience and narratives to flow unfiltered with little if any restraint.
Flush with power after the apparent success of endorsing Biden in 2020, Helmuth and the team at Scientific American endorsed Harris in this election cycle. Their faulty reasoning and inanity-filled platitudes were met with mocking. But I am sure Helmuth and her crew were sure they positioned Harris for success.
However, when the popular votes were counted and the electoral ones tallied, President Donald J. Trump clearly prevailed. Arguably, Americans were voting against the progressive agenda that the magazine was pushing.
Once the magnitude of the Trump win became apparent, Helmuth lost all sense of professional decorum and scientific objectivity, and had herself a spectacular social media meltdown.
Helmuth simply became another leftist woman, completely losing it simply because the other candidate won the presidential election. In doing so, she embarrassed herself and diminished Scientific American a little bit more.
As a woman of science myself, I went through the same experience myself. However, instead of insulting those who failed to see how awful Biden and his administration would be, I doubled down on the work I did to support the solid science we need to develop and implement better policies. Granted, I carried on after some alcohol and many supportive calls from friends and family.
To be fair, Helmuth is now disavowing her statements.
But there are signs that Helmuth’s protective bubble has burst.
Ultimately, however, this is not just about an editor or a particular journal. It is a symptom how screed and rage-posting has become normalized in areas of science that intersect with policy and politics.
Scientists are human, and are entitled to all their opinions and feelings. But those who wish to be taken seriously, especially by the public, must return to the roots of science and embrace the scientific method. They also must be willing to be challenged and debated by those who have different viewpoints.
There are small signs that some anti-Trumpers in the scientific community may be doing a wee amount of self-reflection. In an editorial in Science, H. Holden Thorp (professor of chemistry at George Washington University) opens with a massive insult to both the President and his supporters..but finally concludes:
It is sometimes said when talking about the loss of trust in science that it’s less worrisome because the loss is tied to the overall loss of trust in institutions. That is true: The overall trust in scientists is still strong compared with most other sectors, and the decline is similar to that for the military and religious leaders.
But why settle for that? Public trust in science could far exceed that engendered by opaque and bureaucratic institutions if the scientific community stops acting like them. That means being more forthcoming and accessible, showing that scientists indeed update ideas when new data come along, and putting people and the public interest ahead of money and status for the powerful.
Perhaps Thorp will re-review what he wrote, and perhaps offer less insults and publish more articles challenging the powerful and the special interests foisting specific science-based narratives on this country. A great deal of trust in science has now evaporated, and saying Trump and his supporters tap into “xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth” isn’t going to restore that trust.
Science publications, institutions, and researchers must return to their roots of questing for knowledge and innovating in ways that serve our country, rather than dictate terms and conditions…and insulting non-scientists who have serious and thoughtful concerns about the information being dished out.
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CYA girl! I remember that it was one of the first magazines I subscribed to when I graduated 40-plus years ago. Still have the old copies in the basement. She is a disgrace.
Ditto… I always enjoyed getting SciAm in the mail and usually read it cover-to-cover, but somewhere around the turn of the century it started getting more obviously biased left in its articles, to the point that I finally didn’t renew my subscription. Disappointing, but not surprising, to see that it has continued its decline into irrelevance. Now it’s just another institution that’s been ruined by leftist ideology.
Same here. I subscribed to SciAm for many years. What’s funny is that I received a survey from SciAm, and I said, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” Then they published a hit piece on Lomborg. It’s not that I agree with Lomborg, but the stupid hit piece was obviously biased. I canceled my subscription because of that hit piece.
Yes the Lomborg rant was also the end for me.
That’s the January 2002 issue–according to Google.
Gone are the days when SciAm was a respected magazine. I stopped subscribing in the ’80s, and it has only gotten worse since then.
ditto
I remember one time they wrote an April’s Fools article in the mid 1960’s, when I was a gullible teenager, that completely fooled me until towards the end. It was about a small, rare and endangered species of animal called “snouters” with highly evolved noses. The noses got more and more absurd (with wonderful hand-drawn illustrations) as the article went on, and then the article sadly concluded that all further research on “snouters” had to be halted because the island had been used for a nuclear test. That article was my initiation into the wisdom of having a healthy degree of skepticism. But funny as hell!
I always awaited the next “Amateur Scientist” column expectantly…when they dropped it, I dropped my subscription.
Back then you wanted a tranny with a stick in your car.
Was the stick to beat the tranny?
Now you have to beat the tranny with a stick to get them off your car (at least when they are
rioting“protesting”).Ditto… and Ditto to DonRT.
I canceled my subscription sometime prior to 1980, dating by where I lived at the time, when the political article (which was usually the first one) was all about how communist capitol cities are better than capitalist ones, and used the two Koreas as its examples. Picture of Seoul was bright, colorful, packed sidewalks, store windows full of light and products. Picture of Pyongyang was dull gray, no people, no traffic, no signs, no store windows, nothing. I let it expire. Such a stupid thesis anyway, and to illustrate with the worst pair possible was beyond my tolerance, even if it did still have other good articles.
Same here. I used to subscribe to Scientific American and Science News. I dropped them both when their quality went down and when they became political.
My father subscribed to the magazine around 1960 when I was in middle school. I read it cover to cover. The magazine then featured articles by leading researchers about their research. Many of them won Nobel Prizes.
It was an exciting era in science. Sub-atomic particles, plate tectonics, DNA, computing — lots of really substantive stuff.
The magazine also had wonderful regular features. Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games was stunning, if a bit over my head. His books are still in print. The Amateur Scientist featured do it yourself scientific experiments such as how to build your own telescope, including grinding the mirror and a cyclotron in case you wanted to make subatomic particles in your garage. I used an article on how to build a cloud chamber out of a coffee can for my 8th grade science project*. I photographed what I took to be a cosmic ray with my grandfathers Polaroid camera.
I might have become a scientist but for a catastrophic misadventure with 2nd year calculus in college. After that I declared a history major.
The deterioration of the magazine has paralleled the deterioration of science. The physical sciences seem to have played out. Sabine Hossenfelder, a German physicist, has documented this on her website. The funding and the attention is now on the religion of “climate science” which is mostly video games having no contact with the real world. But, much of science is plagued by fraud and malpractice. The most important scientific publication now is Retraction Watch.
*When my now 40 year old children where in middle school the “science” teacher taught them how to collect garbage. Aggravated the he11 out of me. I am sure it is much worse now.
That is not an uncommon experience. I think that the problem came from the emphasis on solving integrals, which is facilitated by rote memorization of trigonometric equalities and learning little ‘tricks’ such as “sin(a) ~ a” for very small angles. The irony is that with the ready availability of computers today, numerical approximation has become more common than exact solutions.
There are plenty of computer algebra programmes that will tackle soluble problems in calculus. Mathematica and Maple are probably the most comprehensive.
“numerical approximation ~ Slide Rule”
“within an order of magnitude”
“putting people and the public interest ahead of money and status for the powerful.”
Hmmm … I thought science & the scientific method was all about putting data first.
The whole point of the scientific method was to avoid the recognized tendencies of humanity to gravitate to their own biases. And the understanding that is the only way to get to the truth of the reality of the world we live in.
If their “scientific method” were data first,
they would as very first thing ask themselves :
Why are my opinions exactly the same of the powerful like Soros,Gates etc and the Davos/WEF people?
The data would tell them that they have all their opinions,especially the new ones noone ever had on this planet until Obama appeared, from billionaires who the MSM and Big Tech whose propaganda they parrot.
And how comes that even uneducated people from 3rd world countries realised 3 years ago that Biden is demented( which a top public interest as people wants to know who runs the country),
but the Scientific American experts did not until the billionaires owned MSM told them 3 month ago.
Especially when we consider that Miss Helmuth (at least she knows her gender) has a Ph D in cognitive neuroscience.
Scientific American jumped the shark into full political advocacy during SDI (Star Wars) about forty years ago.
Yeah, it was way back then that I cancelled my SCI AM subscription. The “rot” was evident long ago. In the previous year, SCI AM had inspired me to write a FORTRAN program making graphic images of the Mandlebrot set.
Maybe I’m getting too old.
I just shitcanned WSJ, because I don’t want pay to be part of a “community” where I can’t use the text “BS” without being chastised for violating it’s standards.
I have been reading Scientific American since I was introduced to it by my father as a teenager and I have been a subscriber for over 40 years. It certainly became very woke over the last several years but I detect that this has softened this position more recently. Nevertheless its position on climate change and gender issues is still more than problematic. It has been followed in this attitude by other magazines such as New Scientist. I carefully considered renewal of my subscription to each of these magazines but continued them rather reluctantly.
My concern is that unlike WUWT it is not possible to make public comments on articles either in the magazine or in the daily newsletters that both these magazines support. I guess that in addition to following tradition, they also take the attitude that because this is “science” the articles are beyond criticism by the plebs. You also find that letters to the editor not conforming to the woke and climate paradigm will not be published. It would be nice if they would allow public comment and then maybe they would learn that not everybody agrees with the them.
In short I am unsurprised that their editor had a meltdown after the election.
In short I am surprised you continue to pay for that privilege.
In 1628 Harvey published ‘de Motu Cordis,’ his early attempt to describe the circulatory system.
Many doctors at the time said that they would “rather err with Galen than proclaim the truth with Harvey.” Almost 400 years later, it seems that scientists have not appreciably advanced in their ability to leave their beliefs and emotions behind and look at the world dispassionately!
Whether one likes Trump or his voters should have nothing to do with any scientific study or how one allocates gov’t resources after a natural disaster! Sadly, those that have allowed their minds to be filled with propaganda and lies often have trouble keeping their emotions in check!
”Those that can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities!” Voltaire’s words seem to have been written for the current age!
There’s a book out The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri that talks about the end of the Age of Mass Media and the Age of Authority — and experts.
I admit that I stopped reading Scientific American decades ago, because politics. Scientists have been good friends of the politicians and the politicians have reciprocated by filling their pockets with gold.
She appears to be weak and unstable, she needs to go.
To be replace by a week unstable DEI hire.
That’s like replacing Joe with Kamala.
IMO she should stay and say thank you to her,
because she is the first to actually say what she really thinks.
Usually these intellectually and morally so superior guys
are really good in hiding their real character.
If she’s not a childless cat lady, she sure looks like one.
It was obvious drunk texting!
In 1989, Scientific American expressed serious interest in my proposal to take over “The Amateur Scientist” department. They flew me to New York to discuss details, and the entire editorial staff was impressed by the various devices I showed them. But after the editor learned I reject Darwinian evolution, he canceled my assignment to write the column, only three of which they published. When a friend at a Houston newspaper wrote about this, my loss of the famous column became an international news story. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post called for interviews. The New York Times sent an editor to my rural office. Many newspapers supported me in their editorial. I did more than 100 radio interviews. Full details are in my new memoir, “Maverick Scientist.”
While the Texas ACLU offered to represent me in a suit against Scientific American, I chose not to sue. Meanwhile, my misadventure at Scientific American was punctuated by several false statements made by its editor, all of which were contradicted by his own voice in a recording my attorney advised me to make. Harper’s Magazine published the recording, which greatly embarrassed the famous magazine.
After the magazine’s editor was replaced, Scientific American published one of my letters to the editor and a major news story about my findings in a NASA-sponsored campaign in Brazil to measure the atmosphere during the annual burning season. In short, the magazine tried to repair the damage they had inflicted on me. This new development, however, shows that the magazine has not learned a vital lesson in publishing, particularly scientific publishing: Never hire incompetent, bigoted staff and never insult your readership. In view of my prior experience with Scientific American, I feel amply qualified to request that the magazine’s management immediately replace the editor and any staff who have insulted me and any others of its readership with their profane opposition to the results of the recent election.
I close by noting that I decided to do full time science for one year after the Scientific American debacle to prove that a person without a science degree can invent scientific instruments and use them to make discoveries published in leading scientific journals. As described in “Maverick Scientist,” that one year was 35 years ago, and my many research papers have been published in more than a dozen leading journals, including the two most famous, Nature and Science.
Interesting comment.
I have a couple of your books that I purchased from Radio Shack a while back. Thanks for all of your contributions.
Why do reject Darwin’s theory evolution?
That was my first thought. Is there a better scientific explanation for the development of the many different forms of life?
In Darwin’s time, genes had not been discovered. However, the modern discovery of the DNA code tends to confirm Darwin’s ‘hypothesis’ of evolution. We share a certain number of DNA genes with all forms of life, including plants.
The DNA code along with mountains of geologic evidence, no pun intended. 🙂
The fossil record is suggestive of evolution but by its very nature, it is spotty at best. DNA has a more compelling staus. Functional conservation is quite compelling indeed. The gene that codes for the development of a fly’s wing will signal the development of a human arm if grafted in the proper place. There is no doubt of the relatedness of all life.
I’m not a geologist- but I do try to follow what happens in paleontology- I think by now it’s not all that spotty. The old creationist argument about gaps in the fossil record doesn’t work any more. Every time a gap gets filled, they’ll say, “but there’s still a gap between that new fossil and …..”
I am aware of the claims that gaps have been filled. In many such cases, a single fossil serves to demonstrate the possibility of a transitional form, but it still remains hopeful speculation. It is impossible to tell if a specimen represents an actual evolutionary step, or is simply a mutant aberration or a limited variation within a group.
The fossil record is rather like a library struck by an explosion and the few remaining damaged books and scattered pages that survive are used to tell a story. Geologic superposition does give a reasonable timeframe for gross comparison, but the resolution is poor.
Entire species have been insisted upon based on a single fragment of jawbone, or an inconsistent tibia. The concept of “species” itself is little more than a convenience for classification and remains poorly defined. It is even more problematic when applied to fossils.
Nonetheless, as I said elsewhere, I find the theory compelling and I lean toward acceptance, but doubt cannot and should not be discounted or ridiculed.
Again, I’m not a geologist but I think the fossil record is much better than that. There are many regions where rock layers are stacked up representing tens of millions of years- and loaded with fossils. Even if the fossils are found in different regions- as long a the rocks can be dated and they can in most places – then what follows what can be determined. From what I can tell, the fossil record is very good and getting better every day. I believe there are several geologists active here- perhaps they can explain this better than I can.
As you point out, the stratigraphy gives us a general indication of the passage of time and the fossils therein do indeed indicate a progression of successive life forms. However, they remain snapshots rather than continuous records. Much is certainly missing since the conditions for fossilization are not constant, and many layers are deposited and removed leaving no trace. Dating has limitations as well resulting in low resolution and comparisons for that purpose often rely on the fossils themselves.
I quarried Eocene fossils in the Green River Formation for nine years and they have a couterpart assumed to be contemporary with them in Germany. It is quite fascianting and you are correct that they tell us much and suggest even more. That being said, the questions remain as to how the changes occurred and much assumption is employed.
As a biologist I am humbled by how improbale such complex mechanisms as life in all of its diversity truly are. When you consider the intricacy of a single cell, with all of its carefully balanced components and chemistry, and expand it to a myriad of even more complex forms it is daunting to contemplate. To think it all a random occurrance is almost frightening and I can understand why some people need to invoke a supernatural component.
That’s the thing. The biochemistry isn’t random, nor are the environmental constraints.
Perhaps chaotic would be a better description, though the discourse has always included the concept of random mutation.
Possibly a very large number of constrained random walks.
and, of course, the roulette wheel of recombination in sexual reproduction.
Certainly, life seems miraculous- along with all of reality as we know- the big bang, stars, galaxies, planets, life, human life. It’s enough to make some people believe in divinities. Maybe that’s the answer- maybe not. We don’t know. I remain a skeptic about any religious answers which all have problems. I think it just is- reality just is. We’ll probably never know unless some aliens visit us – and they say they’ve been watching the planet for a billion years. They might show us videos of dinosaurs and famous historical people. I suggest there are many amazing things for future humans to experience- whether it’s aliens telling us such stories or just the advance of our species across the galaxy. I also suggest the human story is in its infancy.
Assuming such aliens exist at all. I am a die-hard Trek fan, but I must admit the possibility that we are the only ones, or possibly the first and most advanced among the stars. Is life inevitable? Or is it so improbable that we are unique to this planet? The possibility is daunting.
Read, “Imminent” by Luis Elizondo. There are many excellent YouTube channels on the subject of UAPs and aliens. They are rational discussions, not flaky. There will be a congressional hearing this week on Wednesday. I spend as much time on this topic as on the climate thing. I had a good siting of a UFO in ’83- an example of what are referred to as “the Hudson Valley sightings” which occurred in the ’80s and ’90s.
Every living thing is a transition to some other, eventually.
Just because the fossil record is “spotty” doesn’t make it false. Considering the conditions required for fossilization, it’s amazing we have as good a record as we do.
I never said it was false. I indicated it was inconclusive regarding specific evidence for speciation, in part for exactly the reason you offer. So little is preserved, and even less of that is accessible to us. We can hardly hope for conclusive proof under such conditions.
I find it interesting that the opposite condition (of abundant but overlooked evidence) can also exist. Communities of scientists sometimes appear to reinforce their own willful blindness to the obvious. The evidence of an Ice Age is all around us, yet few took note of such a concept even into the era of the “savants” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World”:
In 1815, an alpine goat hunter and mountaineer named Perraudin pointed out to a leading geologist of the time, that “all those big boulders standing around in odd places had been carried there by a glacier long since gone.” But it was a decade later that the skeptical geologist, Jean de Charpentier, was persuaded in a moment of sudden insight that those erratic boulders (out of place in their current location), striations in the rock, polished bedrock, lateral and terminal moraines – could only have been caused by mountains of moving ice on the land. His first paper on the revelation was ridiculed.
Still years later, Charles Darwin reading the “Studies of Glaciers” went out into the countryside to see for himself and immediately recognized the earmarks of an ice age. In a letter to a friend he reported with great excitement, “The valley about here and the inn at which I am now writing must have been covered in at least 800 or a thousant feet in thickness of solid ice.”
Similarly the movements of continents was denigrated despite the geological evidence of common rock types and fossils along what clearly were contiguous coasts. Not til 1960s when ocean spreading was recognized and reported did plate tectonics become a thing taught in schools.
Says McPhee, the plates may only move a few inches per year, but over 250 million years that’s fast enough for the continents to chase each other a third of the way around the globe smashing into each other and shaping our world as they go.
For some ideas to prevail, evidence needs to be piled on top of evidence till the facts become irresistible and their moving mass slowly scours away the doubts and fictions that have taken root.
And before the arrow can hit the target, it must cross half the remaining distance, and before it can complete its journey it must pass half of the remaining distance …
Why do you limit your question to only “scientific explanation”?
I consider evolutionary theory to be a compelling one. However, questions remain that are troubling. For instance, the origin of life requires as much faith absent evidence as biblical Genesis and is nothing more than pure untestable speculation.
Other big gaps are the “irreducible complexity” of cellular function and the Darwinian unfitness of transitional forms. For instance, a foreleg slowly becoming a wing suggests a transitional form that could neither run nor fly and would be selected against rather quickly. Theoretical adaptations such as punctuated equilibrium and quantum evolution attempt to address this concern. Darwin demonstrated natural selection and variation within species but unfortunately, macroevolution, the transition of species, may always be largely speculation.
The origin problem is still the really big one. Even if the chemistry of life is extremely complex- given the vast number of planets, it seems reasonable that a few would succeed even if we as of yet don’t know how. Stephen Jay Gould was mystified by how unicellular species could become multi cellular- he wrote a book on this problem. It all seems to difficult- yet, the overwhelming evidence is that it happened. Decades ago I debated fundamentalist Christians who said, “evolution didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen”. But, it seems that it did happen, ergo it could happen. The alternative of special creation by some Divinity has its own problems only much more so. I’m waiting for some aliens to come down in their UAP- who’ve been watching the Earth for millions of years to tell us how it happened. 🙂 Regarding UAP, be sure to watch the Congressional hearing on the 13th on this topic.
The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Evolution could indeed proceed as outlined in theory. There is no reason to insist that it could not have been orchestrated by a divine being. The one cannot be used to disprove the other.
A divine being that would orchestrate billions of years of suffering and death is one I have no interest in- but of course that doesn’t prove it didn’t happen that way.
The ultimate long term investment.
According to the late Michael Flynn, the mediaeval approach was that work to advance the understanding of nature was God’s will, as it provided insight into His thinking.
That seems a nice way to reconcile religion and empirical research.
You need to distinguish between evolution per se and Darwin’s theory thereof. That evolution happens is not what is in dispute. It is how it happens and what drives it that is, and that I think is his point.
Darwin’s theory relies on purely random mutations driving change and natural selection then winnowing out the winners from the losers. The problem is that the probability of a purely random process giving life forms even as simple as single-celled eukaryotes is so infinitesimally small as to be non-existent.
The trouble is there is no such thing as “simple” in biology. Even the simplest single cell in incredibly complex and involves so many different parts working in concert together for it to survive. For example, something as basic as DNA replication requires at least 5 totally different catalytic proteins to do so. How could these evolve by chance?
There is the question of the speed of evolution. After billions of years of almost no change, the Cambrian saw an incredible explosion of evolution, giving us all the phyla we have today in a 20-million year period. Something changed but what was it?
How is it than we can remove the DNA that produces eyes in fruit flies, but within a few generations, another part of the DNA is recoded to reproduce those eyes? We have no explanation within the Darwinian model.
You don’t have to invoke a deity to explain evolution but you do have to be honest and admit the Darwin model is merely a start to understanding, and not the final answer. Don’t be a Richard Dawkins and defend the indefensible.
“The problem is that the probability of a purely random process giving life forms even as simple as single-celled eukaryotes is so infinitesimally small as to be non-existent.”
I think a response to that valid point is that— it seems that there is a propensity for life to develop when conditions are right- built right into the physics of the universe. That might imply there is some “great mystery” behind it all- which could be interpreted as a mystical or divine essence. I don’t have a problem with that at all. I only have a problem when a specific religion claims to be the one and only correct religion. Trying to nail down what it’s all about seems futile. On October 24th I lost my wife to dementia. She fell in the kitchen and never got up. I found her that way. Where did she go? Maybe nothing more than dissolved back into the cosmic whole- where we’ll all go. Or more. I’d like to think more.
Personally, I do not reject Darwin’s theory , in fact as it is the only theory that seems to make sense is obvious ! But what really troubles me is the basement of the theory , Origins ! After well over 100 years we are not really any closer to solving the Origin conundrum ! How exactly did the first DNA come into existence ? How did life appear from non life ? How did the enormous complexity of the human brain develop, or even how it actually works ? How does human memory work ? As life is so extremely unlikely or with huge odds against it appearing out of the mud of billions of years of time are we unique in the Universe ? a horrible thought ! These and many more questions are the fascinating subjects of future research and science .
I’m glad you chimed in as SciAm’s treatment of you was disrespectful. The whole point of “The Amateur Scientist” was informing “laymen” on how to do some relatively simple and interesting science experiments and you have a good track record with experimental science.
I second Scarecrow Repair’s comment about the SciAm article praising North Korea’s urban planning as a sign that the magazine was going to far left. OTOH, back in the 1930’s, SciAm published an article praising the German eugenics program.
My personal red flag for a scientific publication is when they use “Mt Palomar” for the location of the Palomar Observatory. SciAm was pretty good about getting that right prior to 1980 or so, but by the mid 1990’s it was a rare treat to see them use the correct “Palomar Mountain”. I saw he same thing happen to Science News about 20 years ago, about the same time they started beating the “Climate Change” drums – SN used to be an enjoyable read.
Yeah, kind of a mystery when this started. It is Palomar Observatory and Mount Wilson Observatory.
Mt Wilson Observatory is on Mt Wilson, Palomar Observatory is on Palomar Mountain. FWIW, Sky & Telescope still gets it right (along with other place names such as Hawai’i) and does a reasonable job of covering competing hypotheses of explanations for observed data. That is they are focused on science as a process.
How do they do with Viet Nam?
I used to argue against creationist about evolution. Then global warming advocates appeared, and these so-called allies swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I watched these allies use logic and science to argue with these anti-evolution types. But they didn’t use similar techniques with the global warming types. So now I question scientific evolution. I still think evolution is correct, but much of the science is flawed. For one thing, I’ve never understood their handwaving about how chromosome count can increase in a population. Nondisjunction doesn’t seem to get there.
Attaboy, Forest! I sit here looking at my copy of Transistor Projects Volume 1. Well worth the buck and a quarter I paid for it. For those downstream who are dismayed at your skepticism of Darwin, I suggest that they take a look at Antony Flew’s book “There is a God”.
Scientific American is no longer scientific. It’s stupid.
Kind of an oxymoron really.
Especially when it is owned by a German corporation.
Yeah, but changing their name to Bolshevik Lysenkoist would be too obvious.
Unscientific UnAmerican
Sc Am …..
President Trump had basically the same number of votes in each of the last 2 elections. It seems that 12 million people decided not to vote. Or maybe there was voter fraud in 2020.
Still 8 mill plus votes to count. California has 22 mill electors and as it uses mail in voting extensively signature verification is a slow process. Also Oregon and Washington are still counting and they are democratic leaning too.
You are making assumptions without all the data, plus you have seen a graph with no zero axis which manipulates the differences between elections to make them bigger than they are
It will end up with close to same total votes as 2020. Thus disproving your hypothesis
How can we still not be done counting 😉
Mail ballots need signature verification and those that arent clear are checked back with the voter
The elephant in the room for mail-in ballots is address verification. Empty lots, supermarkets and multiple voters residing in a storage closet are quite common.
Forgot to add that many, if not all the states DO NOT crosscheck their voter rolls with their property list.
Good question.
Lots of voters won’t turn out to vote for an incredibly poor candidate no matter who the alternative is, that’s hardly surprising.
Had the Dems been able to field even a remotely adequate candidate, they’d have likely won comfortably.
That’s for sure the most stupid thing I read in a while.
The Dems had the best candidate ever in 2008.
He had absolutely everything on his side.
A MegaHype.
All MSM & Big Tech & Hollywood and everyone else for him.
A crippled shadow as opponent with McCain noone gave a crap about
and a catastrophic 2nd Bush term as legacy.
Yet Super – Messiah Obama only got 69 mio votes.
But here comes Biden who had absolutely nothing going on for him.
Demented, Slow,Scandals en mass,a crackaddict son with a sextape,
Biden refused to campaign and was hiding in the basement.
He didn’t had Hilarys female voter base.
He got totally crushed by Sanders in the primaries until a miracle happened and he started winning for no reason.
1) The democrats had absolutely not a remotely adequate candidate in 2020.
They sent a dead horse against Trumps booming economy – and still won the race.
2 ) It is literally impossible to outperform Obamas votes, yet every following democrat did it easily.
3)Even if we ignore massive irregularities that never happened before in history (Trump was leading until this point )and then started to happen half a dozen time within an hour,
and the following impossibility that every single irregularity completelyturned the voting tide ( this never happens at the end stage),
it is an impossibility that the VAP vote % goes up from 52% to 62 % .
The VAP turnout has always been 52% +/- 1 throughout the decades.
Even Obama couldn’t change it.
But here comes Joe.Unpopular,Invisible
and gets 12 mio votes and a VAP ratio of 62% during the worst possible voting conditions ( lowest VAP ratio to be expected) as result of Covid.
That’s absolutely impossibilissimo – Yet it happened.
Because we know :ALL irregularities, be it data adjustments, assassination attempts, lawfare,accounting errors (in favor of Ukraine),extremely biased journalism,witchhunts etc happen in favor of globalists.
They have the same luck as the Clintons have with people who become problematic.
And the 2024 irregularity?
Underperforming Kamala only overperformed in no voterID states.
I’m on the other side of “The Pond”, so may be missing something “obvious” to USA-ians, but isn’t VEP (Voting Eligible Population) rather than VAP (Voting Age Population) a more appropriate denominator here ?
So why do you think 10 million voters who were happy to back Biden 4 years ago stayed at home this time around?
8 mill votes yet to be counted. nationwide.
1% of the national vote is still 1.5 mill votes , most states have at least 1-3% OUTSTANDING
California has only 66% of its presidential votes counted according to AP- many are still arriving as they only need to be post marked election day.
The state sends mail ballots to every voter, you dont have to ask
Harris is already at 71 mill votes and Trump at 74.7 mill which shows how outdated that faked no axis comparison was just a few days ago
Yet another lesson in how the electoral college works.
When will they ever learn to learn?
Who thinks that? 10 million more *ballots* were cast, there *weren’t* 10 million more *voters* in all likelihood. All the “mail-in” voting, much of it illegally introduced in violation of state election laws, likely “produced” those excess “votes.”
Attached is one version of that graph.
Notes
– If you “zoom in” on this image file, you can see the “exact” numbers for further “analysis”
– All numbers are preliminary !
– Watch out for the non-zero minimum Y-axis value
– From 2016 to 2020 both the Democrat and Republican vote counts went up “sharply” …
.
There almost certainly was some voter fraud in 2020, as there is in all elections, the problem is in trying to quantify just how much “voter fraud” actually occurred, and therefore whether it might have affected the final result (or not).
There are many (social) media articles about how individuals came across discrepancies with their personal friends and/or family, but any questioning that ended up in court usually concluded with a ruling of :
“You do not have ‘standing’. Case dismissed. No further investigation will be performed.”
One example of another approach is “Jeff Id”, on his “the Air Vent” blog, who has written several posts about extreme “statistical outliers” from 2020.
I have no idea how many of those stories are true, or how much has been distorted in the telling.
What is needed is a “full audit” of (at least ?) one county (or even a state ?!?) that has raised question marks over the last 4 years, but I doubt that the physical evidence — not just ballots but ballot envelopes — has been reliably stored since 2020.
There was an audit in the largest AZ county for 2020, but somehow the results were kept hidden.
Lie. Maricopa was ‘partisan audited‘ by a election denial group ( who supressed for a while) and when released the result the same as before ( with tiny change)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/arizona-republicans-release-findings-widely-panned-election-audit-2021-09-24/
There were 2.1 mill ballots
“Truth is truth, numbers are numbers,” Fann said at a Senate hearing on the review, which found only small variations, yielding 99 additional votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump. “Those numbers were close, within a few hundred.”
/plonk/
Your numbers are way out of date and the graph refuted just days later
Trump is now 74.7 mill and climbing.
Harris is now 71 mill and climbing – that puts her at Trumps numbers on the graph
Millions more votes to come, but obviously Trump won.
Just 1% un counted vote is 1.5 mill people !
I personally know a few people who withheld their vote from both candidates as a form of protest.
I used to subscribe to and loved Scientific American many years ago, but when it put politics above science I cancelled my subscription. The debasement of science that they have pursued since is a tragedy.
There is something about older women with long, unkempt, grey hair that puts me off.
There is a saying about not judging a book by its cover. There wouldn’t need to be a saying like this unless we, as a judgemental species, did this all the time.
There is an expectation of being professional in your appearance. There is also an expectation that you would be aware of your appearance.
Younger women (teenage) are cute with long hair. She is not.
My (MY) experience with older, long-haired grey folk, male or female, is that they are a ‘little’ looney.
end of rant.
Yeah I saw a video clip of an old silver haired woman ranting about how Trump was going to take away “OUR” rights to have an abortion.
It occurred to me that menopause would have put paid to any concerns she might have about the need for an abortion.
Reality has left the room, folks.
Yer….
I had some friends that I deeply respected, and had good times with, skiing bush walking, cycling and and the like, who moved to the isolated community of Canberra. Then in no time at all, one became a green, dictatorial, grey, string-haired, but no cats. Any conversation around any topic invariably became … slush.
Earlier in the Year I called in to meet-up and see how my former colleague was fairing with dementia. My bum had not even met the seat when she wanted to know in aggressive tones if I was voting “Yes” for the voice. I said I did not believe Australia should be divided by race.
Same thing, same insane inflexible attitude, same rants, same discordance …
Sad but true. I hope he is OK.
b.
Wow. All the things she gets wrong and you fixate on whether or not you would want to f*** her. Wow.
He mentioned us being a judgemental species, and here you are.
He didn’t say anything remotely indicating that he wanted to engage with a bit of horizontal hip-hop with her, just that she presents as a frump.
#metoo ?
I think you need to seek help.
Cute is children, small animals, outfits, behaviour.
Sexy is different. I could describe someone as sexy, but it doesn’t mean I want to dry-hump their leg. It’s simply a description.
If I describe someone as ugly it doesn’t mean I wish to do physical harm to them.
You may not be “able to tell a book by its cover,” but I have found that one can learn a lot from the colorful, illustrated dust jacket.
I guess a book titled ‘Black Holes’ with a nude on the cover, is quite possibly, not a physics book.
IIRC she has journalism and “social sciences” degree/s. Why is she editing an alleged science journal?
Because it’s “content”, not truth or science.
We all constrain our behavior in dealing with each other. Its called politeness. It allows civil society to function. Why do leftists think it right to abandon the norms of civility?
Dunno but maybe you could ask them very gingerly-
‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’: Harvard cancels classes after US election result
Trump would earn a motzah in the sewer drain cleaning business.
I would have thought using the eff word is so unladylike and demeaning it becomes sackable
Are you sure “she” identifies as a lady?
It’s more that the mask slipped regarding her attitudes to 50% of Americans. It immediately calls into question whether articles are accepted on merit, or for their political ramifications. I expect editors to have bias (they shouldn’t have), but they are supposed to keep it quiet, so that there is a veneer of respectability about their rag.
Once great Sci Am now has no credibility.
Do you think she should wear high-heels in the office and smile more too?
Dropping F-bombs isn’t clever or business-like though I do believe there is a time and place to break through mimsy. But disapproving of it becaus it’s “unladylike”?
(I handed in my SciAm subscription about 1992 and gave my accumulated copies to our corporate library. It had lost its scientific integrity).
There was a time when scientific reserch was mainly financed by corporations. Recall IBM, 3M, many medicals and pharmas, many miners and so on.
Then governments increased their intrusions and their offerings of grant monies, so by 2000 it was mainly governments funding research. (This is a simplified account. It varies by sector).
Governments can make laws that attach to financing, much more than industry could or would. But governments are political animals with some properties that do not mix well with top science research.
So, scientists took some valuable research time to write prescribed grant applications to political bodies. Service industries tied to scientific research, like publications, also became servants to pleasing governments.
It has become somewhat of a mess. It was better without government help. I know, I was there for both flavours over time.Pleasing the political class led to more expression of “belief” in scientific studies eating into the former “evidence based” approach. This is because most pollies can understand beliefs, but few understand data.
If the joint is to be cleaned up, we have to get politics out of scientific research and funding and get industry back to strength. It is as simple as that.
Geoff S.
President Eisenhower predicted it.
No publication that calls itself a science journal has any business getting involved in politics and issuing political endorsements. If one does so it instantly discredits itself as a science journal, and its pronouncements thereafter are nothing but polemic.
What Scientific American has become is just another degenerate rag.
I would believe the same if SA came out in favor of Trump and GOP policies
The old saying is that politics and religion don’t mix, like oil and water. Ditto for politics and science.
The reason is simple: politics and religion are all based upon “knowing the truth” and living accordingly.
Science is based upon the search for truth – and can never rest on “knowing” the ultimate truth about anything.
Like oil and water.
Perhaps the scientific method, applied to issues up for debate in political arenas, could help unravel the messy tangle we find occurring in many places. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear that legislators were undertaking actual, methodologically rigorous studies of climate, gender issues, for example?? Yes, I know I dream….
That last quote is not as reassuring as you might think. In fact, it is not reassuring at all.
One of the mantras of the Left is that “If we only communicated better, the ignorant masses would all fall in line after seeing how right we are!”
This is the language of the school indoctrinators, the re-education camp administrators, the elite would-be tyrants all over the world.
Most of the editors in Unscientific UnAmerican happen to be women. Reverse discrimination?
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.
Pov. 26:11
I have ancient copies of Scientific American, some dating from 1867. (That’s not a typo.) Plenty of articles on the latest advancements in steam technology. 🙂
Last year I was doing some research on steam and was reading issues from this time; the Brooklyn bridge hadn’t been built yet, and all of the images were hand-drawn etchings.
The quality of both the writing, and the etchings in the early SAs was amazing. Our science may be more advanced now, but our people not so much.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time admiring the details in this etching of the proposed bridge across the East River (click to enlarge). Many of these early issues are available on archive.org.
Just another crazy, middle-aged angry Dem. I guess if you can’t keep your emotions in check so as not to embarrass yourself, maybe you should stay off social media sites until you come to your senses (if you can). SA is such a looser publication that being the EIC is tantamount to being editor of the high school paper.
Sadly for decades now, they have not been Scientific, nor American.
I always thought perhaps the first and foremost characteristic of a scientist, is to be skeptical. Following the herd and never examining the consensus doctrine, is not good for science, and not even for a religion. Yet here we are…
Subsequently, Laura Helmuth disavowed her screed and vitriol.
Should have thought about that before going public with it. What’s the saying – “Believe them when they show you who they are”
The meltdowns I’ve been seeing are troubling. It’s hard to believe there is that much of society that far gone. Many are also quite concerning – look up “MATGA”.