Canceling Darwin

It will be ironic if Charles Darwin is not ejected from his lofty status as a secular scientific saint by scientific and mathematical criticsm, but by the ignorant baying of the savage mob:

Up until now, Darwin has been considered something of a hero on the political left, due to the religious right’s opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools (or at least, their insistence that one should“teach the controversy” that supposedly surrounds evolution and creationism). However, it is quite possible there will soon be a reckoning. For Darwin’s writings contain ample statements that would put him far beyond the pale of what is now considered acceptable.

First, differences between the sexes. In The Descent of Man, Darwin states that “the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” And in an 1882 letter, he states that “women though generally superior to men to moral qualities are inferior intellectually,” and that “there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance… in their becoming the intellectual equals of man.” He also observes in The Descent of Man that “the male sex is more variable in structure than the female.” This observation has since become known as the greater male variability hypothesis, and has been applied to a variety of human traits including, mostcontroversially, intelligence.

Second, differences between the races. Referring to some natives he encountered in South America during the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin observes, “one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures.” He dedicates a whole chapter of The Descent of Man, to his study of “the races of man.” In that chapter he states, “There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other… Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.” And in an earlier chapter of the book, he contrasts the “civilised races of man” with “the savage races,” noting that the former will “almost certainly exterminate, and replace” the latter.

Third, eugenics. In The Descent of Man, Darwin states, “We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination… Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.” He then observes, “It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” However, he also notes, “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature… We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.”

If they're going after Churchill, they certainly won't give St. Darwin a pass. These barbarians don't care about history and they care even less about scientific history.

Humankind: A Hopeful History

Anthropologist and Castalia House author CR Hallpike provides a taste of the bass for you in his very skeptical review of Rutger Bregman’s  Humankind. A Hopeful History, which is being pushed by the Prometheans as the latest Harari/Gladwell/Diamond-style pop pseudoscience. We will be officially announcing Dr. Hallpike's latest book, Darwinism, Dogma, and Cultural Evolution, tomorrow, and this review should provide you with an accurate picture of the sort of intellectual straight razor he brings to the dissecting table when taking apart the subversive lies of the inversive pseudointellectuals.

_____

There is a fashionable view that human nature is essentially selfish, competitive, and aggressive. Whenever people appear to be altruistic, so the narrative goes, we always find that they are really acting in their own interests or to bolster their own self-esteem. This view has certainly been popularised by generations of economists and political theorists, and has been a prominent feature of business schools and the financial world. Evolutionary biologists in particular have tied themselves in knots trying to explain how human beings have managed to develop highly complex systems of social co-operation if they are fundamentally selfish. As Bregman quite rightly says in his book, this is certainly a false and one-sided view of human nature that needs correcting: there is indeed plenty of evidence that human beings (apart from psychopaths) are also genuinely altruistic, kind, and co-operative although Bregman is certainly not the first person to say so.

Back in the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer pointed out that we have a kind of dual nature, displaying what he called “the ethics of amity” to our kin, neighbours, and those we consider members of “our group”, and, potentially, “the ethics of enmity” to those we consider outsiders, and Darwin completely agreed with him, emphasising the importance of co-operation for successful human groups in the struggle for survival. Wars between nations, for example, would be impossible if we were fundamentally selfish because we would all simply run away rather than risk our lives for our country. So I do not think that many anthropologists would be startled to hear that amity and enmity, co-operation and competition, are simply the opposite sides of the same coin. Some degree of selfishness is in any case a pre-requisite of survival. As Michael Tomasello very reasonably says, “All viable organisms must have a selfish streak; they must be concerned about their own survival and well-being or they will not be leaving many offspring. But human co-operation and helpfulness are, as it were, laid on top of this self-interested foundation” (Tomasello 2009:4-5).

Unfortunately it takes Bregman more than 200 pages of amateurish anthropology discussing the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers, agriculture, and the rise of the state, as well as a host of other topics (including the Lord of the Flies, domestication, Stanley Milgram and his electric shock experiment, soldiers who wouldn’t fire their weapons, and the murder of Susan Genovese) before he finally reaches the fairly obvious conclusion that “The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. They’re two sides of the same coin” (Bregman 217).

In his opinion the problem is that our natural habitat for 95% of our history was the hunter-gatherer band, where we all lived in freedom, equality and friendship, but this was ruined by the adoption of agriculture and private property. This was “the biggest mistake of all time” that ripped us out of our natural habitat and gave us “the curse of civilisation”. “From the moment we began settling in one place and amassing private property, our group instinct was no longer so innocuous. Combined with scarcity and hierarchies, it became downright toxic. And once leaders began raising armies to do their bidding, there was no stopping the corruptive effects of power” (Bregman 244). 

As a journalist he not only knows very little anthropology but also has an irritating folksy style and refers to humans as “Homo puppy”, and to Machiavelli, sometime Florentine ambassador, as “a down-and-out-city-clerk”, and says of hunter-gatherers “Nature provided everything they needed, leaving plenty of time to relax, hang out, and hook up”.

He begins the book by claiming that “...humans have for millennia navigated by a faulty self-image. For ages, we’ve assumed that people are selfish, that we’re beasts, or worse. For ages, we’ve believed civilisation is a flimsy veneer that will crack at the merest provocation.” Whether “We”, as distinct from the intelligentsia, have actually believed this is a moot point, but the first part of the book is nevertheless dominated by the historic figures of Hobbes and Rousseau, because he thinks their influence has been staggering: “...the opposing views of these two heavyweights are at the root of society’s deepest divides” (Bregman 44). Philosophers are certainly accustomed to refer reverentially to Hobbes as “the greatest political philosopher produced by the English-speaking peoples”, or something similar, but to the anthropologist his ideas are simply uninformed nonsense.

For example, his explanation of human psychology is based on physics and the laws of motion, which is not a promising start, and his theory of “the state of nature” is no more convincing. He is faced by the problem of how prehistoric man organized his life and society, and his research technique, if we may call it one, is simply to invite his reader “To consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him”. How much worse, then, it must have been in a time when we lived in a state of nature with no government at all to enforce law and order, so Hobbes concludes that therefore the life of early man must obviously have been “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. Philosophers presumably feel that this very elegantly eliminates the need actually to know anything about the social life of hunter-gatherers.

If the villain of Bregman’s book is Hobbes, his hero is Rousseau, who believed the opposite: that in “the state of nature” before the invention of agriculture man had been altruistic, compassionate and peaceful. Although Rousseau was as ignorant as Hobbes about primitive societies, Bregman is nevertheless convinced that he was a great thinker who is still highly relevant today. Take”, he says, “this scathing passage about the invention of private property:

The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!

“Ever since the birth of that cursed civil society, Rousseau argued, things had gone wrong. Farming, urbanisation, statehood – they hadn’t lifted us out of chaos, but enslaved and doomed us. The invention of writing and the printing press had only made matters worse...Civilisation, to his mind, had been one giant mistake” (Bregman 46).

These are not deep insights, however, but the babblings of a madman who would like to see all literature, music, and the arts, science, great architecture, technology and medicine swept away, and humanity reduced to sitting naked in the dirt on the ground munching on a root. If the numerous members of the intelligentsia who have added their praises to the cover of this book were to be magically transported to a traditional hunter-gatherer society with the prospect of spending the rest of their lives there, they would be begging for mercy within a few hours. Some degree of inequality and exploitation are simply inevitable features of modern large-scale, complex civilisation which have to be accepted.

This long-standing idolisation of hunter-gather society rests not only on a highly selective view of civilisation but on almost complete ignorance of anthropology. In the first place, the development of agriculture did not, as Rousseau, Bregman and many people assume, produce the institution of private property for the simple reason that the clearing of the ground of trees and brush, the preparation of the soil, planting and weeding, and perhaps fencing are all communal activities beyond the powers of a single individual. Anthropologists have studied many stateless farming societies, and the general rule is that land is owned by groups of kin or neighbours, and individual members of these groups inherit the right simply to use this land. (Individual ownership is typically a much later development.)

Bregman thinks that the private ownership of land must have brought the hunter-gatherer pattern of sharing to an end and replaced it with selfish acquisitiveness, competition, and growing inequality. What in fact happened was that populations increased and became dominated by kin groups like clans and lineages, and these developed leaders based on seniority of birth. There was also a marked tendency for kin and neighbourhood groups to develop norms of mutual support and solidarity that were much stronger than those typical of hunter-gatherer bands. This was in part because of their inherent stability, by contrast with the shifting composition of bands. The Konso (Hallpike 2008) with whom I lived in Ethiopia, for example, were advanced farmers whose ancestors had lived in the same very large settlements for many generations and were notable for their high degree of neighbourly co-operation. Not being able to move freely to other settlements, they had every incentive to behave properly to one another. The Tauade of Papua New Guinea (Hallpike 1977), on the other hand, were shifting cultivators and also had very impermanent group membership, and this lack of social solidarity was a most important factor in their high level of violence.

Many people like Bregman believe that the bands of our hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been altruistic and compassionate, united by a team-spirit of group loyalty and comradeship, but studies of modern hunter-gatherers do not support this. Members of bands move from one to another at marriage, or to avoid those with whom they have quarrelled, and so are not under the same constraints as members of the Konso type of society. Although sharing and mutual generosity are certainly basic customary practices, we should not exaggerate their compassionate and comradely aspects, because all this gift-giving is based on quite conscious self-interest – if you don't help others they won't help you. There is also a strong undercurrent of envy, which makes people uneasy if they have more than some other members of the group.

Marshall says of the Bushmen, for example ‘Their security and comfort must be achieved side-by-side with self-interest, and much jealous watchfulness. Altruism, kindness, sympathy, or genuine generosity were not qualities that I observed often in their behaviour’ (Marshall 1976:350).  Nor is there much evidence that band members are specially loyal and supportive of one another.  Among the Chewong of Malaysia, says Howell, ‘Individuals are expected to, and on the whole do, carry on their activities on their own.  It is a rare sight to witness someone asking someone else for assistance.  Similarly, offers of assistance are also rare.  I have many times watched strong young people lying about all day while old, and sometimes ill, people toil with heavy work without asking for or receiving help’ (Howell 1989:38). According to Woodburn, ‘The Hadza [of Tanzania] are strikingly uncommitted to each other; what happens to the individual Hadza, even close relatives, does not really matter very much.  People are often very affectionate to each other, but the affection is generally not accompanied by much sense of responsibility. If someone becomes ill he is likely to be tended only so long as this is convenient’ (Woodburn 1968:91). He discusses, in this connection, how they often leave the sick to die, and gives the example of a paralysed boy abandoned by his mother and other close relatives only a few miles from water, to which they could have carried him without too much difficulty.  Real group loyalty and altruistic self-sacrifice, like romantic love, are not universal features of humanity, but the products of more complex societies which impose more constraints on their members.

Nor is Bregman correct in claiming that hunter-gatherers were basically peaceful and non-violent, and that warfare only began with farming. In the 1960s, hunters and gatherers, in the spirit of the age, were naturally portrayed as especially peace-loving and unaggressive, and it was fashionable to believe that they represented the real nature of Man before greed, militarism and, of course, capitalism, had corrupted it. (There was even a hoax tribe, “the Gentle Tasaday”, produced in the Philippines to lend credibility to this belief.) This amiable illusion cannot be maintained, and there is a good deal of evidence to show that hunter-gatherers could quite well be aggressive and warlike.  While there was considerable variation among hunter-gatherer societies in levels of violence, very high death rates from fighting are recorded for some Aboriginal groups such as the Tiwi and the Murngin, for example, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although these fatalities occurred over many years of small skirmishes.  Defence of territory is also recorded for some Eskimo groups in earlier times, as it is for the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, the Pygmies, Bushmen and Hadza, and there is plenty of evidence that in hunter-gatherer societies generally, quarrels sometimes led to homicide. The relatively low-level warfare found among the hunter-gatherers seems to have been more often related to vengeance than to any serious competition over resources, vengeance involving quarrels over insults, and disputes that got out of hand leading to murder. Fighting over women was an especially significant cause of violence in these societies, a cause of tension that was sometimes aggravated by the custom of female infanticide. Warner gives a very detailed and vivid account of fighting and its causes among the Australian Murngin:

There are six distinct varieties of warfare among the Murngin. Each. has a separate pattern of behaviour and an individual name. In addition to these there is another form in which only the women participate. The names are nirimaoi yelno, a fight within the camp; narrup or djawarlt a secret method of killing ; maringo (death adder), a night attack in which the entire camp is surrounded; milwerangel, a general open fight between at least two groups; gaingar (ghost spear), a pitched battle, and makaratay a ceremonial peace-making fight which is partly an ordeal. Each six forms will be described in detail. 

Out of seventy-two engagements [over 20 years] in which men were killed, twenty- nine were slain by a gaingar fight, thirty-five by maringo, twenty-seven by narrup, three by milwerangel, and two by nirimaoi yolno. Although the last is the most frequent type of fight, it seldom results in killings; gaingar, on the other hand, has only happened twice in the last twenty years, yet it has accounted for the deaths of twenty-nine men (Warner 1930: 457-8).

For the last twenty years, out of some seventy battles that were recorded for this paper in which members of the Murngin factions were killed, fifty were caused by the desire to avenge the killing of a relative, usually a clansman, by members of another clan (blood revenge). Of these, fifteen were killings that were done deliberately, against the tradition of what is fair cause for a war, because it was felt that their enemies had killed the wrong people when they retaliated for injuries done them. Ten killings were due to members of a clan stealing a woman, or obtaining a woman who belonged to another clan, by illegal means. Five men were killed because they had slain men by black magic. The clans of the men killed by magic slew the men who were supposed to be the magicians. Five men were slain because they looked at a totemic emblem under improper circumstances and by so doing insulted the members of the clan to whom it belonged as well as endangered the latter's spiritual strength. The underlying idea back of the causes for most Murngin warfare is that the same injury should be inflicted upon the enemy group that one’s own group has suffered. This having been done, a clan feels satisfied: if not, there is always a compelling urge within the group for vengeance, which causes a continuous restlessness among those who are out " buy back" the killing of one of their clansmen (Warner 1931: 458).

The following episode in which two women were killed conveys a strong flavour of their attitude to human life:

Some years ago the Liagaomir clan was holding a totemic ceremony and using their carpet-snake totemic emblems (painted wooden trumpets). A woman belonging to the Birkili clan, and a second belonging to the Liagomir, stole up to the ceremonial ground and watched the men blowing the wooden trumpet during the ceremony. They went back to the women’s camp and told them what they had seen. When the men came back to the camp and heard of their behaviour, Yanindja, the leader, said: “When will we kill them ? " Everyone replied, "Immediately." The two women were instantly put to death by members of their own clan with the help of the men from the other group (ibid., 459). 

But warfare between different groups of hunter-gatherers was obviously limited by the sheer lack of numbers of adult men, and by the lack of social organisation and leadership to coordinate military actions of any significance. It was certainly not as marked a feature of hunter-gatherers as it later becomes with the much larger and more tightly organised societies of farmers and pastoralists. Even without actual warfare, however, Bregman exaggerates the relaxed “cosmopolitan” attitude of hunter-gatherers to strangers, who often fell entirely outside the range of those to whom any concern was due.  Among the Eskimo, for example, Balikci records that “In traditional times fear, intense suspicion, and potential or actual hostility permeated relations between strangers” (Balikci 1970:158). The !Kung Bushman says of people from other ethnic groups “We call creatures who are different from us !hohm [wild animals] because when they speak we cannot understand a word” (Lee 1984:131).

According to Bregman the wars that broke out with the beginning of agriculture were fought over land, (though this was not necessarily the case at all), and because villagers became increasingly intolerant of outsiders, except when we could band together against other groups that threatened us. (Again, this was not necessarily the case, and outsiders might be welcomed as additional sources of military strength and labour power in agriculture.)

Clans began forming alliances to defend against other clans. Leaders emerged, likely charismatic figures who’d proved their mettle on the battlefield. Each new conflict further secured their position. In time these generals grew so wedded to their authority that they’d  no longer give it up, even in peacetime. Usually the generals found themselves forcibly deposed. ‘There must have been thousands of upstarts’, one historian notes, ‘who failed to make the leap to a permanent kingship.’ But there were also times when intervention came too late, when a general had already drummed up enough followers to shield himself from the plebs. If we want to understand the phenomenon of ‘war’, we have to look at people calling the shots. The generals and kings, presents and advisers: these are the Leviathans who wage war, knowing it boosts their power and prestige. (Bregman, 101)

This is reminiscent of a very bad undergraduate essay: military prowess did not lead directly to political authority, which also had to be legitimated by descent and religious status; and if we want to understand the phenomenon of war the first thing we need to do is understand the difference between primitive war, typical of uncentralised tribes, and the ‘true’ warfare of centralised states, which Bregman hopelessly confuses in this passage. Among uncentralised tribes, many of whom would have been shifting cultivators, the pattern of violence was one of continuous feuding and homicides, rather than the episodic battles typical of state warfare, and many authorities have noted the extraordinarily high death rates that could accumulate over the years in these societies. Roser (2013) and Livingstone (1968), for example quote numerous instances of stateless societies from around the world with violent mortalities among males of 20% to 50% per generation, which would give death rates of several hundred per 100,000 of population. For example, in the local group of Tauade with whom I lived in Papua New Guinea, over a period of about fifty years there seems to have been almost 1 violent death a year in a population of around 180, or 550 per 100,000.

The development of the state, on the other hand, brought about a general lessening of violence within societies because it placed a monopoly of armed force in the hands of the ruler. In medieval London, for example, the murder rate has been estimated at about 20 per 100,000, and much the same for the rest of the country. While this was ten times the rate of modern times, it was vastly less than the rate of tribal societies. The two World Wars raised the death rates in Germany and Russia to around 150 per 100,000 (Roser 2013), but even that was still far less than the death rate of many tribal societies.

But the development of the state is not all about war and violence, and so far we have not considered two aspects of human nature that are not directly implicated in the discussion of whether we are naturally selfish or altruistic. The first is the innate human love not only of personal adornment but of luxury and material possessions in general, and the second is ambition and love of power. Once the state facilitated the development of technology and crafts the upper classes throughout the history of civilisation have used their position to finance lifestyles of the greatest extravagance in houses, dress, food, and every other aspect of life. This luxury went far beyond the requirements of running the state and any conceivable material needs. The institutions of the state were also a magnet for personal ambition and provided extraordinary opportunities for the abuse of power, which certainly corrupts. (This, it should be noted, is quite distinct from the love of wealth – many powerful people, from medieval clergy to modern dictators have led notably austere lives.)

The world religions that began developing in the first millennium BC were in part a moral response to these developments, and their opposition to worldly pride, vanity, the love of money, and materialism has continued to the present day. In the Western world this has been the Christian Church, and its long dialogue over the centuries with power and wealth has been far more wide-ranging and important in its social influence than our beliefs about human nature. Indeed, since Bregman admits that our potential hostility to other groups is a basic facet of our empathy with our own people, then it cannot follow that

 “...if we believe most people are decent and kind, everything changes. We can completely rethink how we organise our schools and prisons, our businesses and democracies. And how we live our own lives” (381). 

In other words, he never really resolves the basic dilemma “naturally nice to insiders → naturally nasty to outsiders” and therefore cannot confront the fundamental issue of diversity, and the plain fact that diversity does not unify society – it divides it, as we can see every time we open a newspaper. Social conflict around the world is quite obviously exacerbated by differences in nationality, race, culture, and religion, as we can see from the fate of multi-ethnic confederations throughout the twentieth century: the United Kingdom lost Ireland in 1922 and may lose Scotland, while Ireland itself has been split by the hostility between Catholics and Protestants; Belgium can hardly hold the Flemings and Walloons together, and Anglophone Canada nearly lost French Quebec in 1995. Chinese Singapore seceded from the Malaysian Federation, the Slovaks parted company with the Czechs in 1993, and Yugoslavia had already exploded violently into its six component peoples; Sri Lanka fought a civil war with its Tamil minority, and in Rwanda the Hutu slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis; in the Middle East Shias and Sunnis and Israelis and Palestinians still battle it out, and the multi-ethnic Soviet Union collapsed in 1992.

It is also perfectly obvious that allowing mass immigration into Europe has introduced the same issues of social tensions and identity politics, but an additional problem here is the obsession with equality of outcomes. Every section of the population has different interests, priorities and, yes, different aptitudes, but when one section does not achieve the number of University Vice-Chancellors, or Members of Parliament, or High Court judges that corresponds to its proportion of the population it claims to be the victim of oppression and discrimination. Wise government should try to bring out the best in human nature, but popular political ideology in Western society is bringing out the worst, and Bregman’s book does not really give us much help here.

References:

• Balikci, A. 1970. The Netsilik Eskimo. New York: Natural History Press.
• Hallpike, C.R. 1977. Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains. The generation of conflict in Tauade society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Hallpike, C.R. 2008. The Konso of Ethiopia. (2nd ed.). Milton Keynes:AuthorHouse UK. 
• Howell, S. 1989. Society and Cosmos. The Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia. (2nd ed.) Chicago University Press.
• Lee, R.B. 1984. The Dobe !Kung. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
• Livingstone, F.B. 1968. “The effects of warfare on the biology of the human species”, in War. The anthropology of armed conflct and aggression. 3-15. New York: Natural History Press.
• Marshall, L. 1976.  “Sharing, talking, and giving: relief of social tension among the !Kung. “, in Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, eds. R.B.Lee & I. De Vore, 349-71. Harvard University Press.
• Roser, M. 2013. "Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence on Violent Deaths". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths' [Online Resource]
• Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Co-operate. MIT Press.
• Warner,W. L. 1931. “Murngin warfare”, Oceania 1(4), 457-94. 
• Woodburn, J.  1968. Discussion in Man the Hunter, eds. R.B.Lee & I. De Vore, p. 91. Chicago: Aldine.

For the record

Just thought I'd put these out there for future reference:

The Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.
January 14, 2020, World Health Organization

There is no evidence that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory.
April 20, 2020, The Conversation

The World Health Organization reiterated that the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 is "natural in origin." Scientists who are examining the genetic sequences of the virus have assured "again and again that this virus is natural in origin."
May 1, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a renowned U.S. infectious disease expert, has said that there is no scientific evidence to back the theory that the coronavirus was made in a Chinese laboratory. "If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, the scientific evidence is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," he said.
May 4, 2020, National Geographic

WHO says it has no evidence to support 'speculative' Covid-19 lab theory
May 5, 2020, The Guardian

The British government has not seen any evidence to suggest that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was man-made.
May 9, 2020, UK Health Minister Matt Hancock

Scientists: 'Exactly zero' evidence COVID-19 came from a lab.
May 12, 2020, Center for Infections Disease Research and Policy

Evidence of COVID’s natural origin mounts even as conspiracy theory about Chinese lab refuses to die
May 13, 2020, Cornell Alliance for Science

The "evidence" rhetoric

A socialgalactician observes scientistic rhetoric in action.

Me:“here is anecdotal evidence hcq works”
Scientist friend: “so we agree there’s no evidence hcq works”

The devotees of scientistry always, Always, ALWAYS rely upon on rhetoric, specifically, upon a false definition of “evidence”. Their rhetorical redefinition is limited, ironically enough, to “published, peer-reviewed scientific evidence”, which statistical analysis has proven to be less reliable than a coin flip.

The narrative implodes

As with evolution by accident and other fairy tales that are subjected to objective analysis, the mainstream Covid-19 narrative is continuing to unravel:

In what would mark a massive shift in the timeline of coronavirus spread, French researchers believe there is evidence coronavirus may have been in Europe as early as November 2019.

X-rays obtained exclusively by NBC News show two patients with symptoms in their lungs consistent with the novel coronavirus dated Nov. 16 and Nov. 18, months before COVID-19 was believed to be spreading in the country. Researchers from Colmar, France, announced the X-rays last week and are working to confirm whether the patients had coronavirus.

France had originally believed its first case to have been Jan. 24.

The study comes in conjunction with a study by other French scientists who discovered last week that a coronavirus patient had been treated in the country in December.

The doctors from the Groupe Hospitalier Paris Seine in Saint-Denis said a sample taken from a 42-year-old fishmonger admitted to the emergency room on Dec. 27 had tested positive for the coronavirus.

But... but China! And bats! And pangolins! This ability to demolish the Official Story is why science - genuine scientody - has been converged and controlled for decades.

Covid-19 made by men, for men

With the "bat soup" story discredited, the "wet market" theory disproven, it's only a matter of time before the "leap from animals" narrative is blown apart as well:

A team of Australian scientists has produced new evidence that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is optimized for penetration into human cells rather than animal cells, undermining the theory that the virus randomly evolved in an animal subject before passing into human beings, and suggesting instead that it was developed in a laboratory.

The study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, provides new but not yet conclusive evidence favoring the theory that the novel coronavirus originated not in a food market as has been claimed, but rather in a laboratory, presumably one operated by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, the city in which the first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in December of 2019.

The lead researcher on the team says that the results represent either “a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention” in the creation of the virus.

The authors of the study, led by vaccine researcher Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in Australia, used a version of the novel coronavirus collected in the earliest days of the outbreak and applied computer models to test its capacity to bind to certain cell receptor enzymes, called “ACE2,” that allow the virus to infect human and animal cells to varying degrees of efficacy.

They tested the propensity of the COVID-19 virus’s spike protein, which it uses to enter cells, to bind to the human type of ACE2 as well as to many different animal versions of ACE2, and found that the novel coronavirus most powerfully binds with human ACE2, and with variously lesser degrees of effectiveness with animal versions of the receptor.

According to the study’s authors, this implies that the virus that causes COVID-19 did not come from an animal intermediary, but became specialized for human cell penetration by living previously in human cells, quite possibly in a laboratory.

As I've said from the start, this coronavirus was obviously a lab-produced bioweapon. The only questions that remain are a) who developed it, b) who released it, and c) against whom?

CDC's contaminated coronavirus tests

At a certain point, one has to stop simply attributing to incompetence what was clearly done with evil intent.

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

It's gradually becoming more apparent that neither China nor the USA was to blame for the pandemic, but rather, Deep State elements in academia, media, the DNC, the CDC, and the State Department. It increasingly appears to have been, like impeachment, a desperate attempt to derail the Trump administration.

And I suspect we all know the reason for the desperation.

Corona-chan hates fatties

One thing I noticed in all the pictures of the victims of the coronavirus was that those who were not very old tended to be very overweight. Apparently this may not have been just the coincidental result of a pro-body positivity bias on the part of the editors selecting the photos.

For months, scientists have been poring over data about cases and deaths to understand why it is that COVID-19 manifests itself in different ways around the world, with certain factors such as the age of the population repeatedly popping up as among the most significant determinants.

Now, one of the largest studies conducted of COVID-19 infection in the United States has found that obesity of patients was the single biggest factor in whether those with COVID-19 had to be admitted to a hospital.

"The chronic condition with the strongest association with critical illness was obesity, with a substantially higher odds ratio than any cardiovascular or pulmonary disease," write lead author Christopher M. Petrilli of the NYU Grossman School and colleagues in a paper, "Factors associated with hospitalization and critical illness among 4,103 patients with Covid-19 disease in New York City."

Remember, the first element of scientody is observation.

The humility of genius

Martin van Creveld writes about the limits of human knowledge:

At the heart of relativity lies the belief that, in the entire physical universe, the only absolute is the speed of light apart. Taken separately, both quantum mechanics and relativity are marvels of human wisdom and ingenuity. The problem is that, since they directly contradict one another, in some ways they leave us less certain of the way the world works than we were before they were first put on paper. The uncertainty principle means that, even as we do our best to observe nature as closely as we can, we inevitably cause some of the observed things to change. And even that time and space are themselves illusions, mental constructs we have created in an effort to impose order on our surroundings but having no reality outside our own minds. The incompleteness theorem put an end to the age-old dream—it goes back at least as far as Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE—of one day building an unassailable mathematical foundation on which to base our understanding of reality. Finally, chaos theory explains why, even if we assume the universe to be deterministic, predicting its future development may not be possible in a great many cases. Including, to cite but one well-known example, whether a butterfly flapping wings in Beijing will or will not cause a hurricane in Texas.

So far, the tendency of post-1900 science to become, not more deterministic but less so. As a result, no longer do we ask the responsible person(s) to tell us what the future will bring and whether to go ahead and follow this or that course. Instead, all they can do is calculate the probability of X taking place and, by turning the equation around, the risk we take in doing (or not doing) so. However, knowledge also presents additional problems of its own. Like a robe that is too long for us, the more of it we have the greater the likelihood that it will trip us up....

Furthermore, surely no one in his right mind, looking around, would suggest that the number of glitches we all experience in everyday life has been declining. Nor is this simply a minor matter, e.g. a punctured tire that causes us to arrive late at a meeting. Some glitches, known as black swans, are so huge that they can have a catastrophic effect not just on individuals but on entire societies: as, for example, happened in 2008, when the world was struck by the worst economic crisis in eighty years, and as coronavirus is causing right now. All this reminds me of the time when, as a university professor, my young students repeatedly asked me how they could ever hope to match my knowledge of the fields we were studying. In response, I used to point to the blackboard, quite a large one, and say: “imagine this is the sum of all available knowledge. In that case, your knowledge could be represented by this tiny little square I’ve drawn here in the corner. And mine, by this slightly—but only slightly—larger one right next to it.” “My job,” I would add, “is to help you first to assimilate my square and then to transcend it.” They got the message.

Read the whole thing. It is a master class on the importance of understanding that what you know, and what you think you know, are merely a momentary glimpse of a fragment of the whole.

Projections of infinity

Tom Wolfe anticipated the failure of modern neuroscientists to discover the soul in his 1996 essay "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died".

If I were a college student today, I don't think I could resist going into neuroscience. Here we have the two most fascinating riddles of the twenty–first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely. In any case, we live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless to avert your eyes from the truth.

Ironically, said Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism, is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn't detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind (to the late–nineteenth–century's great venereal scourge, syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart, and self–destruct. I thought about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on "Limits to Scientific Knowledge." The consensus was that since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus, a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted, but they wouldn't get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty notions, all of them primitive, and they can't record anything. The project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior to the dog's, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human beings arriving at some final, complete, self–enclosed theory of human existence is doomed, too.

This, science's Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists for the past seventy years, has been beset by...doubts. Scientists—not religiosi—notably the mathematician David Berlinski ("The Deniable Darwin," Commentary, June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box, 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten, the Messiah, are already screaming. They're beside themselves, utterly apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above the battle.) By 1990 the physicist Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado had already begun going after Einstein. He greatly admired Einstein for his famous equation of matter and energy, E=mc2, but called his theory of relativity mostly absurd and grotesquely untestable. Beckmann died in 1993. His Fool Killer's cudgel has been taken up by Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut, who has many admirers among the upcoming generation of Ultimately Skeptical young physicists. The scorn the new breed heaps upon quantum mechanics ("has no real–world applications"..."depends entirely on fairies sprinkling goofball equations in your eyes"), Unified Field Theory ("Nobel worm bait"), and the Big Bang Theory ("creationism for nerds") has become withering. If only Nietzsche were alive! He would have relished every minute of it!

Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God.

It's one of his better essays. Read the whole thing. What it eventually comes down to is the obvious and incontrovertible fact that science cannot explain that which falls outside its conceptual limits. As human souls, we are projections of the infinite into material reality, which is why both physics and neuroscience have been unable to quantify, or even meaningfully describe, the phenomena of life and consciousness. Scientists will only ever be able to wrestle with the materially observable effects of those phenomena, because they lack the ability to directly observe the infinite.

And one of the primary goals of the Deceiver is to convince those projections that they have no connection to the infinite, and by doing so, eliminate it.

A Darwinian theory "proved"

What was actually proved here is that evolutionary biologists a) don't understand scientody and b) are extraordinarily stupid:

Scientists from Cambridge University, in the U.K., analyzed the relationships between the two, calculating how the number of species per genus and the number of subspecies per species for a number of different animal groups.

Laura van Holstein and Robert Foley used information collected by naturalists to determine the “age” of different species and subspecies to see how they closely they were connected.

They noted a correlation between species variation and subspecies variation. Genera with a higher number of species tended to have species with a higher number of subspecies. This relationship was particularly strong among flying mammals like bats. In comparison, land-based animals showed a positive correlation between species richness and subspecies richness—but this correlation was weaker.

It is often observed, correctly, that correlation is not causation. It is remarkable that Cambridge University scientists don't understand that correlation is also not conclusive proof. If you've paid any attention to the non-science of Neo-Darwinian evolution over the years, you will have noticed that every observation that correlates with the revised theory is a proof of it, while every observation that falsifies it is merely an indication that the revised theory requires further revision.

And while one can't blame the scientists for the way the media portrays their work, the headline is even more embarrassing.

Scientists 'prove Darwin's survival of the fittest theory'

Another word for God

Martin van Creveld considers the problem of consciousness from the scientific perspective:

Starting at least as far back as Laplace—much earlier, if one cares to go back all the way to Epicurus—scientists have been arguing that consciousness grew out of the matter that preceded it. Not so, says Dr. Lanza: no natural process known to us could have performed that feat. Instead, he says, it was consciousness which gave rise to the world—so much so that, without the former, the latter could not even have existed.

To understand what he meant, take the popular riddle concerning a tree that has fallen in a forest with no one there to witness the fact. did it make a sound? Of course it did, say ninety-nine percent of those asked. Not so, say Dr. Lanza and a few others. The splintering of the trunk and its crash on the ground certainly gave rise to vibrations in the surrounding air. However, in the absence of anyone to receive those vibrations in his or her ears, transmit them by way of the acoustic nerves, and process them with the help of the brain, they would not have amounted to what we know as sound.

What applies to hearing applies equally well to our remaining senses. What the specialized neurons in the back of our brains register is not the world’s existing, objective, sound, light, and impact. On the contrary, light, impact, and sound are created by those neurons. To adduce another example, a single rainbow that can be seen by everyone who looks in the right direction at the right time does not exist. What does exist are trillions of raindrops. Each one carrying a potential rainbow; and all “waiting” to be discovered by animal sense organs and brains to be brought to bear on them. Instead of the internal and external world being separate and independent of one another, as Descartes would have it, they are merely two sides of the same coin. That, incidentally, is also the best available explanation for the riddle of quantum mechanics where, as far as we can make out, the speed and position of elementary particles seem to be determined by the fact that they are or are not observed.

This premise serves Dr. Lanza as the foundation on which to build everything else in the book, leading up to the conclusion that “the universe burst into existence from life [which is the seat of consciousness], not the other way around.” What I personally found most interesting in it is the following. We present-day humans are immensely proud of our scientific prowess. And rightly so, given that it has enabled us to study, and often gain some understanding of, anything from the bizarre submicroscopic world of elementary particles that exists right under our noses to gigantic galaxies more than thirty billion light years away. Dr. Lanza’s contribution is to point out that, without taking account of consciousness and the life with which it is inextricably tied, we shall never be able to understand reality as a whole.

One of the great conundrums that confound atheists is that while the average atheist intelligence is modestly higher than the average religious intelligence, the most intelligent individuals are considerably more religious than the norm. This is, of course, because we are less likely to cling stubbornly to our preconceived assumptions than midwits are.

The truth about the Douma Report

Peter Hitchens helps two whistleblowers publicize their critique of the document that was used to justify US and British bombings in Syria:

The investigation report is a bait and switch tactic that creates the illusion of a report about a breach of confidentiality, when in fact it is little more than a public defence of the scientifically questioned Douma Report. Ironically, the defence, from a highly technical and scientific body, is not founded on science or logic, but on ad hominem attacks on two of its former inspectors, who had raised concerns about the scientifically indefensible manner in which the Douma investigation was conducted. It is classic ‘if you can’t get the ball, get the man’.

In another classic ruse, the Technical Secretariat tries to distract from the serious concerns of A and B, by trying to portray them as “individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence”. This is demonstrably false and conspicuously the report never says what those ‘views’ are supposed to have been. As a technical body the TS will be aware that inspections, verification, or investigations are never about ‘views’. Views are subjective by definition. They are not the currency of scientists and engineers who (should) only deal in facts, evidence and hypotheses.

It is about the suppression and cherry-picking of these facts and evidence, and the refusal to test alternative hypotheses, which is scientifically questionable, that Inspectors A and B have raised concerns with senior management. These concerns are not exclusive to A and B. Other inspectors involved in the Douma investigation have the same, but because of their contractual relationship with the Organisation are not free to raise them without fear of repercussion.

It's a brutally-effective fisking. As usual, the Official Story and the mainstream narrative are both false.

Scientistry is fake science

Even without taking the reproducibility crisis into account, it is becoming readily apparent that "published, peer-reviewed science" is not the ultimate arbiter of the truth. Or even a moderately reliable proxy for it. From a 2019 paper published in Science and Engineering Ethics called "Assessing and Raising Concerns About Duplicate Publication, Authorship Transgressions and Data Errors in a Body of Preclinical Research":

Authorship transgressions, duplicate data reporting and reporting/data errors compromise the integrity of biomedical publications. Using a standardized template, we raised concerns with journals about each of these characteristics in 33 pairs of publications originating from 15 preclinical (animal) trials reported by a group of researchers. The outcomes of interest were journal responses, including time to acknowledgement of concerns, time to decision, content of decision letter, and disposition of publications at 1 year. Authorship transgressions afected 27/36 (75%) publications. The median proportion of duplicate data within pairs of publications was 45% (interquartile range 29–57). Data/reporting discrepancies [median 3 (1–5)] were present in 28/33 (85%) pairs. Journals acknowledged receipt of concerns for 53% and 94% of publications by 1 month and 9 months, respectively.

After 1 year, journals had communicated decisions for 16/36 (44%) publications. None of the decision letters specifically addressed each of the concerns raised. Decisions were no action, correction and retraction for 9, 3 and 4 publications, respectively: the amounts of duplicate data reporting and data/reporting discrepancies were similar irrespective of journal decision. Authorship transgressions affected 6/9 (67%) publications for which no action was decided. Journal responses to concerns about duplicate publication, authorship transgressions, and data/reporting discrepancies were slow, opaque and inconsistent.

Translation: you know that "science is self-correcting" idea? It's completely and utterly false. It's nothing more than propaganda for scientistry.

The numbers are fake

I'd already reached the same conclusion about the legitimacy of the statistics after keeping track of the official Corona-chan numbers for a few days. The spread of the disease was far too smooth to be genuine. So, as usual, the one thing we can be certain isn't true is the official story:

In terms of the virus data, the number of cumulative deaths reported is described by a simple mathematical formula to a very high accuracy, according to a quantitative-finance specialist who ran a regression of the data for Barron’s. A near-perfect 99.99% of variance is explained by the equation, this person said.

Put in an investing context, that variance, or so-called r-squared value, would mean that an investor could predict tomorrow’s stock price with almost perfect accuracy. In this case, the high r-squared means there is essentially zero unexpected variability in reported cases day after day.

Barron’s re-created the regression analysis of total deaths caused by the virus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of last year, and found similarly high variance. We ran it by Melody Goodman, associate professor of biostatistics at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.

“I have never in my years seen an r-squared of 0.99,” Goodman says. “As a statistician, it makes me question the data.”

Real human data are never perfectly predictive when it comes to something like an epidemic, Goodman says, since there are countless ways that a person could come into contact with the virus.

For context, Goodman says a “really good” r-squared, in terms of public health data, would be a 0.7. “Anything like 0.99,” she said, “would make me think that someone is simulating data. It would mean you already know what is going to happen.”

About the only thing we know at this point is that non-Chinese victims are not dying at anywhere near the same rate as Chinese victims. And Occam's Razor strongly suggests that the manufactured numbers underestimate the actual ones.

Tracking the outbreak

Corona-chan at Johns Hopkins

02/15---67091---1527
02/14---64447---1384
02/13---60347---1369
02/12---45214---1116
02/11---43129---1018
02/10---40573----910
02/09---37590----814
02/08---34944----725
02/07---31523----638
02/06---28276----565
02/05---24554----492
02/04---20679----427
02/03---17046----362
02/02---14628----305
01/02---11374----259
31/01----9821----213
30/01----8235----171
29/01----7783----170
28/01----6057----132
27/01----4231----103
26/01----2808-----80
25/01----2117-----56
24/01----1126-----41
23/01-----901-----26
22/01-----651-----25
21/01-----317------6
20/01-----219------4
19/01-----204------3

Spreadsheet image courtesy of Anonymous Conservative. There may actually be some good news here, as the current numbers out of Johns Hopkins, as of end of day 28/01/20, are 6,057 and 132, which, while still ahead of the predicted model, may indicate that the transmission rate is slowing down a little, from 22 percent over to 18 percent over, while the death rate has declined from 45 percent over to 25 percent over. However, it's still too soon to reach any meaningful conclusion.

It's important not to overreact to these statistical models, as you may recall that the Ebola outbreak of 2014 doubled every 4.4 weeks, but the infection rate finally declined and broke the curve in the 9th doubling cycle. So, to know when the coronavirus outbreak is beginning to burn itself out, look for the doubling rate to slow down from its current rate of just over two days.

Alternatively, if it picks up, you may do well to start paying attention to the possibility Corona-chan will be making an appearance closer to you than you might like.

I blame galactic warming

It should be interesting to see how the globalists attempt to make use of the possibility that Betelgeuse will go supernova in the near-future:

Betelgeuse is a gigantic red supergiant star that was the 10th brightest star in the sky as recently as 2019. But over the past few months it has dimmed so dramatically it's now ranked 24th, and it has astronomers wondering if it might be ready to burst in a spectacular supernova explosion.

Edward Guinan and other astronomers from Villanova University shared a brief update on Betelgeuse over the weekend, reporting it's now about one full magnitude fainter than it was in September. Magnitude is the scale of brightness astronomers assign to objects in the night sky. Put another way, this change in scale means that Betelgeuse was about 2.5 times brighter in September than it is right now.

"The most recent photometric observations indicate that Betelgeuse is currently the least luminous and coolest yet measured from our 25 years of photometry," the astronomers write.

It should be amusing to hear the Gretard ranting about how everyone ruined her childhood, her dreams, and her night sky.

Making the omega

It's interesting to see how social scientists are stumbling, slowly, toward recognizing the socio-sexual hierarchy:

There is also a dark side to the social world of middle school, as anyone who has been through it will remember. Sixth graders who do not have friends are at risk of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. About 12 percent of the 6,000 sixth graders in Juvonen’s study were not named as a friend by anyone else. They had no one to sit with at lunch and no one to stick up for them when bullied. Of that group, boys outnumbered girls nearly two to one, and African American and Latino students were more likely to be friendless than white kids.

Inspired by the University of Chicago social psychologists John Cacioppo and Louise Hawkley’s work on perceived social isolation and the sense of threat that comes with it, Juvonen and her student Leah Lessard investigated whether perceptions of social threat could explain the mental-health difficulties that beset friendless middle schoolers. Their hypothesis was that not having friends in sixth grade triggered a greater sense of threat in seventh grade, which led to increased internalizing difficulties, such as depression and anxiety, by eighth grade. Their research confirmed that theory: It wasn’t friendlessness alone that created problems, it was the resulting sense of threat.

Then there is bullying, which Juvonen has studied extensively. “Friendships take place in this larger context where there’s a status hierarchy,” she told me. “Kids know very well which kinds of kids are friends with one another and where they stand in that overall status hierarchy.” Most of the time, bullying is a very strategic effort to gain and maintain status, she said.

Omegas are those who retreat from the hierarchy or are rejected by it. Gammas are those who manage to stay inside the hierarchy by strategic alliances with "friends" who are not actually friends. That is the primary dividing line between the two.

My first Nobel Prize

I would have thought it would be in Economics, perhaps even Literature, but it appears my first Nobel Prize will be in Physiology or Medicine. You see, everyone is understandably concerned about Corona-chan, but then it occurred to me, as we all know, race is just a social construct:

To further understand the special population of ACE2-expressing AT2, we performed gene ontology enrichment analysis to study which biological processes are involved with this cell population by comparing them with the AT2 cells not expressing ACE2. Surprisingly, we found that multiple viral process-related GO are significantly over-presented, including “positive regulation of viral process” (P value=0.001), “viral life cycle” (P value=0.005), “virion assembly” (P value=0.03) and “positive regulation of viral genome replication” (P value=0.04). These highly expressed viral process-related genes in ACE2-expressing AT2 include: SLC1A5, CXADR, CAV2, NUP98, CTBP2, GSN,HSPA1B,STOM, RAB1B, HACD3, ITGB6, IST1,NUCKS1,TRIM27, APOE, SMARCB1,UBP1,CHMP1A,NUP160,HSPA8,DAG1,STAU1,ICAM1,CHMP5,D EK, VPS37B, EGFR, CCNK, PPIA, IFITM3, PPIB, TMPRSS2, UBC, LAMP1 and CHMP3. Therefore, it seems that the 2019-nCov has cleverly evolved to hijack this population of AT2 cells for its reproduction and transmission.

We further compared the characteristics of the donors and their ACE2 expressing patterns. No association was detected between the ACE2-expressing cell number and the age or smoking status of donors. Of note, the 2 male donors have a higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than all other 6 female donors (1.66% vs. 0.41% of all cells, P value=0.07, Mann Whitney Test). In addition, the distribution of ACE2 is also more widespread in male donors than females: at least 5 different types of cells in male lung express this receptor, while only 2~4 types of cells in female lung express the receptor. This result is highly consistent with the epidemic investigation showing that most of the confirmed 2019-nCov infected patients were men (30 vs. 11, by Jan 2, 2020).

We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.

Therefore, to significantly improve the resistance of the population to Corona-chan and end the risk of a global pandemic, all that is necessary is for the Asian men in the areas at risk of infection to begin identifying as African-American women.

I shall await my Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with serene confidence.

Atheism is genetic

Or is, at the very least, a developmental disorder linked to genetic causes:

The largest genetic sequencing study of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) ever conducted has found 102 genes associated with autism, a major step towards an eventual cure, which may involve genetic manipulation. Most of these 102 genes were expressed in the brain, and affect synapses or regulate other genes. This means they have important roles in switching other genes on and off.

Furthermore, 49 of these genes are also linked to other developmental disorders, underlining the fact that the neurobiology of many such conditions are likely to overlap.

I first postulated my hypothesis concerning a link between the autism spectrum and atheism back in  2007 in response to a post by PZ Myers at Pharyngula in which he and other atheists were bragging about their relatively high Asperger's Quotient scores. I wrote: "Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder."

Since then, at least two scientific studies that were directly inspired by my hypothesis have found that there is a statistical correlation between atheism and the autism spectrum.

This new study indicates - it does not yet prove, but it indicates - that scientists will eventually be able to find a link between those 102 genes and atheism, which suggests that it is atheism, not religion, that will one day be cured by science. One should note that this genetic link also explains why atheism has never propagated very successfully from one generation to the next, as atheists tend to be very unfit in the evolutionary sense of natural and sexual selection.

So, don't be bothered by your shower-averse, science-loving, fedora-sporting acquaintance who insists on quoting Richard Dawkins at everyone apropos of nothing. Just assure him that he does well to trust in science, as one day science will cure his genetic developmental disorder.