Again, thanks for the lesson.

Thanks for the reply. I agree with "narrow Darwinism" as you state it: "a) individuals vary, b) more individuals are produced than can be supported by the environment, and c) those individuals who are best able to reproduce are likely to see their variations increase in frequency within the population's next generation." Thanks also for the explanation about how species with different numbers of chromosomes can produce viable offspring.

I would guess 2-5% is probably about the correct number.

20% is probably too high, but the percentage of fraudulent articles is a lot higher than most people think.

By definition EVERY "profession" requires ethics training. However, if by "profession" you mean mere job title, then, yes, fewer do, For this paper, I reviewed about 15 different ethics statements from geographers to geologists and physicists to physicians. They all have ethics training. They all have ethics failures.

This is a bit of a non sequitur. There are unscrupulous people in every profession, but very few professions require ethics training; molecular biology does. Furthermore, in my professional experience, unscrupulous people had their careers destroyed; that is hardly the case for many other professions.

You may take issue with the particulars of the ethics training, but it's an extraordinary thing to accuse 20% of an entire profession of being "crooks." You have no statistically relevant evidence to support your claim and at least some anecdotal evidence to make you rationally believe the opposite.

"About 1150 AD lecturers and their students came to Paris. Within the next generation, they received from the pope a charter for incorporation as a guild, thus deflecting the controls of king and bishop.

"Oxford’s status derived from its isolated locale. Teachers and their students clustered there to be apart from the wider world. Although the bishop at Ely appointed the chancellor in 1214, by the end of the century the masters elected their board. In Cambridge, the university – also rooted in loosely connected lecturers and their students – applied for a royal charter, and continued to petition for renewal with each change of monarch. Cambridge also received papal recognition in 1233. In the 14th and 15th centuries, German universities were often founded by a local prince or baron and less often a bishop, but nonetheless continued in the tradition of a corporation, independent of the noble house. Universitas referred not to the school per se but to the law of incorporation which recognized a collective entity. Thus, universities always had the right and obligation of independent governance.

"The disconnect comes from the fact that the ethical standards are created by professional societies whose enforcement powers are limited. The American Physical Society could do little to Jan Hendrik Schön (even if he had been a member), but the University of Konstanz stripped him of his doctorate even though they found no fault with his thesis. If universities created rigorous curricula in ethics, that would close the information loop, completing the feedback cycle, controlling the proportional, integrated or differential variances by scientists from the norms of moral and ethical practice." -- ibid.

I agree. Do I know scientists who have been unscrupulous? Sure. But there are unscrupulous people in every profession - waiters that spit in your food and legislators who engage in insider trading. In my own training, I had to take an Ethics of Science class. I can also tell you that for those who fudged data, others tried to repeat their results. The fudgers were caught and stripped of their Ph. D.

100% of the scientists? among the IIASA Society, are crooks. Most of them do not even have formal training in Climate Science. The Chief Scientist is an Anthropologist with some training from Al Gore.
I had copied their Statutes in August 2009. It is no longer available on their website.
The IIASA is a closed group. Real scientists like Dr Patrick Michaels are not members of the group.
"Regular members are scientists who have spent at least one month working at IIASA---"
"Extra-ordinary members are non-scientific people who express a special interest in IIASA, and wish to support its' work."
Honorary members are those persons who, express a special interest in IIASA, and wish to support its work."
"All members have the right to vote in the General Assembly."
This group of so-called scientists is more political science than real science.
As a Mechanical Engineer, with extensive knowledge of thermodynamic and heat transfer I dispute their findings.
I have personally researched and evaluated the data and have found it to be inadequate to substantiate their claims.
The historical temperature data for the oceans comes mostly from Weather Buoys. The National Data Buoy Center publishes an interactive map showing the location of all of the buoys. www.ndbc.noaa.gov As you can see from this map,almost all of the buoys are between 20 degrees South latitude and 60 degrees North latitude. Very little data is available for the South Pacific, South Atlantic, and both of the Poles.
The IPCC group of so-called scientists have taken a very meager, hopelessly inadequate historical data set and great manipulation present us with a result that the world's temperature has increased by 1/2 of a degree over 50 years and postulate that CO2 is destroying our planet. They offer no margin for error. This is preposterous and I think very unscientific. The IPCC group of scientists who are climatologists are frauds. Most of the nonscientific members have a political agenda.
The objective of the theory of man-caused global warming is governmental control of the energy sector of our economy. This will be the final nail in the coffin of Freedom.
I have designed a Micro-Grid solar energy system that will economically provide for all of the energy and water needs of an off-grid independent self sustaining community. Anyone interested in being part of "Independence", Texas?

I would go along with 20% of scientists are wrong. But by defending their theory and trying to get it funded and put into use is not being a crook. It' may be being incorrect but that doesn't make them crooks. It is important to make this delineation. If you are speaking of presenting a theory to fellow scientists and you know it's fraudulent, chances are you'll be shot down quickly and won't have the opportunity to be a crook. If, on the other hand, you make a convincing argument to the public about a theory you know is false particularly in order to make a profit, you are a crook. A con man. In other words, Al Gore.

3. The fact that their isn't a great linear relationship between number of genes and what is superficially considered the "complexity" of the organism in no way undermines Darwin's postulates. Only 1% of our DNA encodes genes (that begin with the nucleotides ATG). The more we investigate the rest, the more we discover that it spatially and temporally informs how these genes are turned on. Then you have gradients of gene products, and at five different concentrations along the organism you have five physiologically distinct outcomes.

Furthermore, plants are actually very complex. Unlike animals, they don't germinated with ANY ORGANS - they go through organogenesis throughout their lifetime. And while they can have 3 or 4 copies of every chromosome (3 copies of one chromosome in humans is usually fatal), they also have a different mechanisms to ensure they're getting the correct gene dosage.

2. The mechanism of evolution has been discovered: modern genetics. Darwin's first postulate was that individuals within a species vary, and that some of these variations can be inherited. Genetic variation happens through a lot of different mechanisms. You have two copies of every chromosome - one from mom and one from dad. With each child you have, there is a 50% chance per chromosome pair that your child will inherit the one your mom gave you, and 50% that they will inherit the one your dad gave you. That means that there is a 1 in 2^23 chance that your second child inherits the exact same assortment of chromosomes from you as the first child.
There is still more ways that genetic variation arises. There's homologous recombination, where both copies of the same chromosome (one from mom, one from dad) exchange pieces, so that the chromosomes you inherit don't look exactly like the chromosomes you parents have. Furthermore, the enzymes that copy DNA to make more cells (and gametes) aren't perfect. They usually only make a mistake once in a billion nucleotides, but that's a 2 nucleotide difference every time the DNA is copied.
In my research, I have DEMONSTRATED evolution in E. coli. But E. coli has the shortest generation time known (20 minutes), and it still took 10 days to demonstrate. Fruit flies (and organism I've also studied) has a generation time of 10 days, which means it would take about 2 years to show evolution in one gene - far from a new species. BTW, no graduate student is going to sign onto a project where it takes 2 years to complete 1 experiment. That doesn't make them crooks, it just means they value their time.

I appreciate the fact that you do not take the Theory of Evolution on face value. Here are some things that I think will help round out the picture:

1. There is nothing about fertile hybrids that contradicts evolution. Most hybrids are infertile because they have an odd number of chromosomes. When you make gametes (sperm, in your case), you split your 46 chromosomes into their homologous pairs, and one from each pair (23 altogether) goes to each sperm. Imagine if you mated with something that had only 44 chromosomes. Your baby would have 45 chromosomes (23 from you, 22 from the mother). What would your baby do when it produced gametes? It can't split them int 22.5 chromosomes. That's why most hybrids are infertile. However, it is possible for two species to have a fertile offspring (say one has 48 chromosomes, and the other 44 - the offspring could produce gametes with 23 chromosomes). As I said, this in no way invalidates Darwin's theory that a) individuals vary, b) more individuals are produced than can be supported by the environment, and c) those individuals who are best able to reproduce are likely to see their variations increase in frequency within the population's next generation.

Yep, think government funding prostitutes.

Great! So the only thing we know is that 20% of those scientists who publish may be crooks, but the published amount is a small subset of the whole. I get the sense that a correct figure might be 2% or, perhaps, .2%!

This recent study shows that less than 1% of publishing scientists publish the vast majority of papers. The study looked at the period from 1996-2011 and recognized just over 15 million publishing scientists worldwide.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ado...

Thanks for the link to Feynmann. I had read that years ago. Nice to re -read

Mike, how many scientists does LeVay cite? In your view, how many scientists are there in the USC? In the world? I ask because I have this sense that, unless LeVay has tons of evidence, that 20% figures seems way out of whack with reality.

Hi, Mike:) What is the evidence for this claim?

"Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself. Caltech's 1974 commencement address"

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/...
http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/car...

I can well believe the stories of fraud in science and medicine--especially in the science *of* medicine.

Which is worse? Crooks--or would-be tyrants like Floyd Ferris?

Here we see the utility of the John Galt Method of scientific research and application. In Galt's Gulch, and at the Twentieth Century Motor Company before Gerald Starnes, Senior died, a scientist worked for a businessman. He devoted his work to inventing something that businessman could build and sell on a large scale. Because to John Galt, there is never any such thing as "non-practical knowledge," nor any kind of "disinterested" action.

In John Galt's world, private investment and R&D budgets take the place of government grants. The focus stays on invention rather than some cloudy category some wag calls "abstract knowledge."

Sure, there's a place for the development of abstract knowledge. And the way the scientist finances that, is to develop insights that might be applicable to far more than just one business, and then offer those insights as lectures or white papers--for a price. That is what John Galt does in the Gulch: the John Galt Lecture Series on Theoretical Physics.

Crooked science wouldn't last a year, or even that long, in Galt's Gulch.

And the university system would no longer have the authority to judge what is sound, and what is unsound, science.

I think we have been here before, the expositions of Richard Dawkins among others are clear, the genetic code being digital produces very good reproductions but they are are never quite exact. It may not be the environment that produces mutations but the inherent property of the code to not replicate exactly. I recall having seen tracking of fruit fly generations that show new species occurring, the test is who one generation can mate with. (My source was not the notorious Suzuki!).
Intermediate forms- whenever one is discovered the creationists say there are now two gaps to explain!
MM, your reasoning is good, but try more up to date sources.

Paradigm= Fraud in this case.
The independence traditionally given to universities we can now see does not promote or defend freedom of speech and the integrity of the scientific method. The commercial imperative of the enterprise take over. Maybe it would not be so serious if there were not the billions within reach to support the stories of the current government. In this type of commercial imperative there is no countervailing power.
As to university=legally within itself, very interesting.
So like the Roman church perhaps?

Noting that Hogan is a science fiction writer and Baen is a science fiction publisher, the fact remains that the argument is valid. Here in the Gulch, when I questioned Darwinism, the mainstreamers called me "ignorant about science" and admitted to refusing to read anything on the subject.

"Fertile hybrids demonstrate the limitations of strict Darwinian taxonomy." -- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/...

"The mechanism of evolution has not been discovered. No consistent theory exists. Random mutations adapting to changing environments was the first suggestion. When subatomic radiation was discovered, that became a proposal. Now, epigenetics may indicate another, more powerful, model. Darwinian evolution does not explain the lack of intermediate forms. Scientists have bombarded fruit flies and mice with every radiation known and produced no new species." -- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2014/...

" It is challenging to consider that we have about the same number of genes as mice and fish; but we have far fewer genes than plants. " -- http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2013/...

You took a Thumbs Down for that. I pointed you back up to +1. Such down votes are examples of intellectual fraud and philosophical dishonesty.