Contrabang #6 Leaking Leftism

This will be a fairly lengthy episode of Contrabang, covering five articles of Starts With a Bang! Ethan went off topic a couple times this week. I won't hold that against him, since my own blog wanders all over the place, but I'll tag along with him a bit jut to show that, whenever he does wander off topic, it is always to promote some other aspect of the progressive agenda. Liberals and lying scientists go hand-in-hand, and quite often are one and the same.

I notice from the viewer stats that not all readers are interested in Contrabang, but that is to be expected. It's not light reading, and I even sometimes skip the more technical posts of blogs I follow when I'm not in the mood for it. For those who are following along - which is still more than half of the normal traffic - I appreciate you hanging in there. I do think that this is probably the most important services that this blog offers, because no one else is providing counterpoint to Ethan's blog - the most popular independent science blog on the web. Frankly, I don't necessarily enjoy taking an hour or two every Sunday to do this; I see it as a chore. But also, I'm quite impressed with the men at Contra Krugman who stick it out to rebut lies week after week. Somebody has to do it! I'll do what I can to keep it light, but I can't always promise to keep it short, since Ethan posts so frequently. With that, let's begin.

This Is What Our Sun’s Death Will Look Like, With Pictures From NASA’s Hubble (link)

Our Sun will someday run out of fuel. Here’s what it will look like when that happens

The primary offerings of the left are materialism and despair. They say: the world is entirely material, and it is doomed to end catastrophically. They really have no evidence of this calamity other than their theory of the stellar lifecycle, which is practically a toy theory. The fundamental problem is that scientists take the best working hypothesis they have and reflexively promote it to first-class status. It stems from collective hubris of the scientific community. They can't just say, "there is a really bright light in the sky that powers all life on earth and we don't really know how it works." There are two reasons for this. First, the small one, is that great fame and fortune can be had by concocting the big theory of the day, even if it's later refuted. Not a bad deal for the ambitious materialist! Second, the bigger one, is that scientists are more concerned with disproving religious beliefs than anything. The reason they won't admit that modern genetic evidence has refuted the theory of evolution, or that they don't really know how stars work, are one and the same.

Fantasy Genetics Is The Most Important, And Worst, Science In Game Of Thrones (link)

Ethan takes a break from physics for a bit to discuss the immorality of genetics in a fantasy television series.

Here on Earth, we hold one important truth to be self-evident above all others: that all humans are created equal. [...] While certain genetic combinations may provide advantages or disadvantages under specific environmental conditions, the idea that there is an “objectively best set” of genetics has no scientific merit.

Only liberals here on Earth promote the first sentence. [If it means what Ethan thinks it means, then he must question why he is quoting the words of a slave owner.] And note that the second sentence is effectively a strawman argument. Of course there is no "objectively best set" of genetics. No one says that it is subjectively true, let alone that it has scientific merit. Saying that there is not a "best" set of genes is not the same as saying all sets of genes are equal.

But the idea of a “genetic purity” shows up most strongly with the Targaryens. [...] But this is a white supremacist’s ideal view of genetics, not a lesson in how genetics actually works. In reality, race is not a biologically meaningful category. In reality, genetic diversity increases biological fitness among humans, rather than diluting it. In reality, inbreeding poses a dizzying array of potential inherited disorders.

You get the idea. Just advocating that all races start mixing or we'll fall prey to scary recessive disorders, and if you breed within your race you are an inbred white supremacist. It's totally false, by evidence of the fact that all the races on earth today have managed to survive just fine. It's zero real science, all virtue signaling, and total nonsense. [Don't be alarmed. Whatever race you are, it's perfectly safe to continue your particular genetic lineage if you wish. The isn't actually any scientific reason to remove all genetic diversity by making the gene pool homogeneous. I don't advocate for any race to interbreed itself out of existence, because I'm not genocidal.]

What Was It Like When Life’s Complexity Exploded? (link)

As surprising as it may seem, there were really only a handful of critical developments that were necessary in order to go from single-celled, simple life to the extraordinarily diverse sets of creatures we’d recognize today.

Complete nonsense, especially for the mainstream genetic materialist, which I assume Ethan to be, based on his eagerness to promote such beliefs in other domains. Refer to yesterday's post on iterative evolution. If you believe changes arise from random genetic mutations, then functioning multicellular traits are wildly improbable.

Relying on random mutations alone, and passing those traits onto offspring, is extremely limiting as far as evolution goes. If mutating your genetic material and passing it onto your offspring is the only mechanism you have for evolution, you might not ever achieve complexity.

Quite often, I agree with this guy 100%. But then he always doubles back towards absurdity. It's like he intentionally says something sane, to prove he's not insane, before continuing on with the insane thing that he really wanted to say to being with.

But many billions of years ago, life developed the ability to engage in horizontal gene transfer, where genetic material can move from one organism to another via mechanisms other than asexual reproduction.

That has nothing to do with evolving new traits, but an approach to mixing and propagating traits that have already evolved by random mutation. New traits do not arise from sexual reproduction.

As creatures grew in complexity, they accumulated large numbers of genes that encoded for specific structures that performed a variety of functions. 

Wrong, there are only 19,000 genes in the human genome. In a body with trillions of cells, interconnected in an impossibly complex web of interdependencies, a genome of a few thousand is shockingly small. If scientists were honest, they'd all be agreeing that something is amiss here.

Multicellularity, according to the biological record left behind on planet Earth, is something that evolved numerous independent times. 

This is not evidence that support evolution by random chance. That is either evidence that the evidence is wrong (the taxonomies are completely unreliable) or that life has a will of its own.

The rest of the post is not worth commenting on, but know this: he managed to work in a photograph of the Obama family. Liberal bias theory: QED.

Cosmology’s Biggest Conundrum Is A Clue, Not A Controversy (link)

He picks up on the same story that we covered here in Intersectional Astrophysics, which examined recent measurements of the alleged expansion of the universe that would seem, to everyone but cosmologists, to contradict older measurements with a different value. Ethan tells us that it's not actually a controversy! [emphasis added]

Although it sounds bizarre, both groups could be correct. The reconciliation could come from a third option that most people aren’t yet willing to consider. Instead of the distance ladder group being wrong or the early relics group being wrong, perhaps our assumptions about the laws of physics or the nature of the Universe is wrong.

Is Ethan on to something? Does he finally realize that maybe the many layers of unproven assumption on which modern astrophysics rely on are like a growing stack of dishes doomed to topple over? You know the drill! The paragraph continues.

In other words, perhaps we’re not dealing with a controversy; perhaps what we’re seeing is a clue of new physics.

NOO!! Arrghh!!! Calling basic assumptions into question is not a clue for something new "in other words." Those aren't the same thing! One is taking a step back; the other is barreling on forward.  They always, always, always, always do this: they state the need to question basic assumptions, before immediately embracing that precarious stack of dishes while searching for a new plate to throw on top.

Ethan promotes a few possible explanations for the discordant measures, which include,

• dark energy is changing in an unexpected fashion over time
• gravity behaves differently than we’ve anticipated on cosmic scales
• there is a new type of field or force permeating the Universe 

That's the state of modern astrophysics. Dark energy is changing, that's rich. Call it dark delta, or something like that. "We suspect that the hypothetical state of matter that we can't observe which is 3/4 of the universe and violates fundamental laws of the universe, must change in ways we also can't observe."

The option of evolving dark energy is of particular interest and importance, as this is exactly what NASA’s future flagship mission for astrophysics, WFIRST, is being explicitly designed to measure.

Well there you go. There is nothing our government won't fund if there's sensationalist nonsense science afoot.

This is not some fringe idea, where a few contrarian scientists are overemphasizing a small difference in the data. [...] Nobel Laureate Adam Riess, perhaps the most prominent figure presently researching the cosmic distance ladder, was kind enough to record a podcast with me, discussing exactly what all of this might mean for the future of cosmology.

Ethan makes the point I've tried to make several times. I'm not picking on him because I just found some random moronic blog to make fun of. He runs the most popular independent science blog on the internet, which promotes the most mainstream theories and lands interviews with the most mainstream scientists. This is not some fringe blog.

It’s possible that somewhere along the way, we have made a mistake somewhere. It’s possible that when we identify it, everything will fall into place just as it should, and there won’t be a controversy or a conundrum any longer. But it’s also possible that the mistake lies in our assumptions about the simplicity of the Universe, and that this discrepancy will pave the way to a deeper understanding of our fundamental cosmic truths.

The problem is always "assumptions about the simplicity of the Universe." The answer is always more complicity. The answer is never simple. It couldn't be that Type 1-A supernovae are not really standard candles, an assumption based on unproven accretion disk theory. No, that explanation is too simple and, most importantly, caries no funding angle.

Ask Ethan: How Does The Event Horizon Telescope Act Like One Giant Mirror? (link)

Ethan fields a question from the reader, who doesn't understand how the recent black-hole photo was made. He responds by highlighting some aspect of combining wavelengths of light from various sources, without mentioning that it all required a computer algorithm of nearly a million lines of code to produce the image. The cause for skepticism is that, like with the LIGO signal filtering, they may have just selected whatever technique best yielded the expected results. I haven't dug in to see if the algorithm was independently verified, but most reporting seems to prefer to ignore the existence of the massive processing required to produce the image.