/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4772948]

So, I made the horrible mistake of taking Political Science courses at university. As someone who enjoys logic, science and opinions based on observable data, this is somewhat frustrating as my classes generally boil down to listening to spoiled white girls professing to know everything.

So anyways, today in class we were discussing law and society. And someone brought up an interesting point. Should society be designed around individuals, or should it focus on government and allow the laws regarding individuals to fall into place?

Now, having taken some science classes, there is obviously a huge ongoing debate on the roles of nature and nurture. But the exchange went like this.

[Anonymous No.4772953]

>Guy: So should we design societies as we talked about, around the individual?
>Me: Well, although there are definitely variances, there are still some basic tenets of human nature that need to be taken into account. If a society was designed that ignored human behavior, it would probably be a failure.
>TA: Well, actually. Who is to say there IS a such thing as human nature? Humans are completely products of their environment.
>Russian guy: Uh... actually the study of evolutionary biology and psychology shows there are certain patterns of human behavior as you see with any species.
>TA: Actually, there's a huge debate among physicists, biologists, philosophers, as to whether evolutionary biology is another phrenology, an outdated pseudoscience.
>Russian Guy: I actually think there is a fairly strong consensus in the scientific community that there are evolutionary factors that play into human nature.
>TA: Ignores this and moves on.

So my question is fairly straightforward, is there actually any real debate going on in the scientific community about whether evolutionary biology is a pseudoscience and whether nature actually plays no role at all in human behavior?

For the record, my TA literally has a blog where he discusses how he spends his time handing out communist pamphlets at subway stations.

[Anonymous No.4772965]

I've taken one Polisci course. It was online. You were expected to respond to a discussion question on a class forum. I stopped reading other people's responses after the third week. It was either liberals who knew next to nothing about the real world, conservatives, who knew nothing at all (but were sure they knew everything, just like the liberals), or Chinese or Arab immigrants who should have still been in remedial English courses.

[Anonymous No.4772966]

Do you mean "evolutionary psychology"?

[Anonymous No.4772968]

>>4772953
There is hardly any debate within the scientific community about evolutionary biology being a pseudoscience. The only ones that deny evolutionary biology are the religious ones that think god created the world 7 thousand or so years ago and those are a minority. TA sounds more like a christian/religious nutacase

[Anonymous No.4772985]

>>4772968
No, he's totally an out-of-touch liberal idiot.

[Anonymous No.4772988]

>>4772953

That your TA has a problem with Evolution Theory and is a Communist isn't too surprising.

Most Americans identify anti-Evolution theory proponents as being evangelical christians who support capitalism generally speaking, so this may seem somewhat surprising at first.

But in fact, Communism is anti-evolution right at the core of it's philosophy on at least two levels.

1. It is against specialization. This might sound arguable, but it is not if you have any experience of talking with Russians from the old days. Everybody was expected to diversify across many disciplines, they took inter-disinceperlary activity in universities to a level few Americas would understand e.g. all their engineers pretty much got degrees in physics as well as engineering.

This is not a problem per se in all fields, but in the economic production it is complete insanity, because of refuting the division of labour, your production falls off like a stone.

2. Evolution is fundamentally meritocratic at the gene level. If you have better genes at doing X and because of an environmental factor X becomes a criterion for Natural Selection, then you survive and the others do not.

[Anonymous No.4772994]

>>4772966

The Russian guy used the term evolutionary psychology, my TA used both interchangeably.

I suppose in this instance we are discussing evolutionary psychology.

However, in other classes I have heard people say things like "male and female gender does not really exist, it's a social construct".

When you point out that evolutionary biology clearly shows all species of mammal have differences biologically between male and female, they sort of mumble something and reject your argument with no counter.

For example, they say that being transgender is how some people are born. But "Male and female" are just illusions and social constructs. In other words, a female could be born into a male body and know she was in the wrong body because she had female tendencies.
Yet a female cannot exhibit female tendencies, because there is no such thing as male/female behavior, since gender is a social construct.

I probably sound very conservative here. I am not a conservative at all. But just as I find creationists and other right-wing nuts frustrating when they distort science, I find it equally irritating when left-wingers do the same for their own ends.

[Anonymous No.4772995]

I should also mention Lysenko here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

The idea that Communism is more supportive of science because it supports technocratic methods is a mistake.

An easy mistake to make, yes, but a mistake nonetheless.

On a different related point:

Ironically, those Christians who dislike evolution theory but support free markets are being internally inconsistent.

Markets and evolution theory are *extremely* similar, such that there are analogs for every process and entity in every way you can think of. They are almost synonyms the resemblance is so uncanny.

This is probably because evolution is a general principal, an algorithm, of which biology itself is merely one kind of interpretation. Susan Blackmore has some interesting research on this subject (it's where the concept of memes came from).

[Anonymous No.4773010]

>>4772968
>TA sounds more like a christian/religious nutacase

I suspect he's an atheist, gay, and is openly a communist.

Making him pretty much the polar opposite of a typical right-wing creationist.

Then again, Ted Haggard was a gay evangelical creationist, so who knows?

[Anonymous No.4773028]

>But "Male and female" are just illusions and social constructs. In other words, a female could be born into a male body and know she was in the wrong body because she had female tendencies.
>Yet a female cannot exhibit female tendencies, because there is no such thing as male/female behavior, since gender is a social construct.

[Anonymous No.4773030]

> But just as I find creationists and other right-wing nuts frustrating when they distort science, I find it equally irritating when left-wingers do the same for their own ends.

+ nyanthousand

In fact, right wing attacks on science are often extremely easy to spot e.g. faulty methods of using eugenics (i.e. racially motivated 'scientism') or religious attacks on the basis of authoritarian appeals to whatever holy book (and the muslims are as bad as the christians on this with respect to evolution theory).

I find however, that left wing attacks on science are much more difficult to spot. I attribute this to the fact that a majority of scientists are themselves left wing, and has produces a slight bias in the bigger picture.

Examples: Lysenkoism in agronomy, the conflict between 'Deutsch Physics' and 'Jewish Physics', environmentalist literature like Silent Spring, widely believed by many, but completely wrong scientifically.

So while I disfavour all parties seeking to pervert science for their idealogical holy cow, I like to keep an eye on the left wingers more especially, because they are more insidious, possibly more dangerous in the long term. At least you know the enemy with a bible basher.

To prevent bias, look to the data. You can interpret facts in many ways, but you cannot dodge a fact if it exists.

[Anonymous No.4773057]

>>4773030

You mean there are other people who care about the facts more than pushing an ideology?

+50 Faith in humanity

Although
>look to the data. You can interpret facts in many ways, but you cannot dodge a fact if it exists.

Evidently, you can. People in my class literally think there are no biological differences between male and female apart from genitalia.

When I mentioned that males tend to be larger and have more upper body strength, the response was a girl talking about how her cousin supposedly did better during basic training in the military than the guys in her group. And the rest of the class seemed satisfied with that as proof that male and female are biologically identical.

Apparently saying that male humans tend to be larger and stronger, equates to me saying "women are inferior and should stay at home". When I don't think anything of the sort.

[Anonymous No.4773091]

>>4773057

Disclaimer: I am a capitalist. I subscribe to a classical liberal view of economics, which in America is usually called libertarianism.

However, irrespective of my beliefs about economics, this is independent of the scientific facts.

I mean, economics can exist without the concept of markets in a true command economy.

See, there is simply too much information to prove absolutely everything and measure everything. Intellect and data are rare commodities in the real world. That is why we have beliefs about things. Beliefs by default are assumptions. They may be correct, incorrect, or simply not applicable.

I can *think* that communism is not viable as a economic system, but I cannot *prove* that to be the case in all scenarios.

In other words, I am relying on inductive logic, it didn't work here, here and here and here. But I cannot show by deductive logic that communism cannot work because there is too much information to analyse and doing all necessary experiments is literally impossible unless the entire population becomes our labrats forever.

Put simply; being a scientist is about accepting your limitations. There are things you cannot do.

Lastly; your classmates are morons. There is no helping these people nor is it your duty to relieve them of their misconceptions. You ought to take advantage of their gullibility in some way instead. If you know the truth, you have an advantage. e.g. you might select men as army units because that makes much more fucking sense.

[Anonymous No.4773597]

>>4772994
>male and female gender does not really exist, it's a social construct
I raged.