Replication In Science Quotes

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.

It can be argued that the computer is humanity’s attempt to replicate the human brain. This is perhaps an unattainable goal. However, unattainable goals often lead to outstanding accomplishment.

In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans.

How physical beauty turns out to be chemistry and geometry and anatomy. Art is really science. Discovering why people like something is so you can replicate it. Copy it. It's a paradox, "creating" a real smile. Rehearsing again and again a spontaneous moment of horror. All the sweat and boring effort that goes into creating what looks easy and instant.

Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments — particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world — and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments.

Life" is defined as the ability to absorb nutrients (of any kind) and to replicate, not just to exist.

Facts and values are entangled in science. It's not because scientists are biased, not because they are partial or influenced by other kinds of interests, but because of a commitment to reason, consistency, coherence, plausibility and replicability. These are value commitments.

Protein, so far as we know, does not replicate itself all by itself, not on this planet anyway. Looked at this way, the [prion] seems the strangest thing in all biology, and, until someone in some laboratory figures out what it is, a candidate for Modern Wonder. (quote originally by Lewis Thomas)

[...] there is no need to pay homage to the product of selfish genes - as though self-replicating DNA from the old Darwinian era were some sort of secular equivalent to Providence.

But more than anything, they worried that since everyone was using different media ingredients, recipes, cells, and techniques, and few knew their peers’ methods, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one another’s experiments. And replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn’t considered valid if others can’t repeat the work and get the same result.

When the nasal cavity gets congested, airflow decreases and bacteria flourish. These bacteria replicate and can lead to infections and colds and more congestion. Congestion begets congestion, which gives us no other option but to habitually breathe from the mouth.

Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.

May the Code replicate eternal.

Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify

It can be argued that the computer is humanity’s attempt to replicate the human brain. This is perhaps an unattainable goal. However, unattainable goals often lead to outstanding accomplishment.

we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.

When we learn, we alter which genes in our neurons are “expressed,” or turned on. Our genes have two functions. The first, the “template function,” allows our genes to replicate, making copies of themselves that are passed from generation to generation. The template function is beyond our control. The second is the “transcription function.” Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on, or expressed. When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell. This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on, information about how to make these proteins is “transcribed” or read from the individual gene. This transcription function is influenced by what we do and think. Most people assume that our genes shape us—our behavior and our brain anatomy. Kandel’s work shows that when we learn our minds also, affect which genes in our neurons are transcribed. Thus we can shape our genes, which in turn shape our brain’s microscopic anatomy.

The reality is, strengths can be copied. It’s true for your company, and also for you. Products can be replicated. Benefits can be improved upon, secret formulas uncovered, winning systems beaten. People can outdo your strengths. But nobody can outdo who you are. Your personality is the only aspect of your work that nobody can copy. People can copy your product, your pricing, your actions, your recipe or program or formula. But they can never replicate who you are. Who you are is the greatest differentiator you’ve ever had.

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity's original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three. We know the origins of the universe, the physics of the big bang and how the basic chemical elements formed in supernovas. We know that life on this planet originated about 4 billion years ago, and we are all descendants of that original replicating molecule. Thanks to Darwin we know that natural selection is the only workable explanation for the design and variety of all life on this planet. Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have reconstructed much of the human tree of life. We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are the most successful and last surviving African hominid. Every single person on this Earth, all 7 billion of us, arose 50,000 years ago from small bands of African hunter-gatherers, a total population of somewhere between 600 and 2,000 individuals.

Actually, the entire ascent of life can be presented as an adaptive radiation in the time dimension. From the beginning of replicating molecules to the formation of membrane-bounded cells, the formation of chromosomes, the origin of nucleated eukaryotes, the formation of multicellular organisms, the rise of endothermy, and the evolution of a large and highly complex central nervous system, each of these steps permitted the utilization of a different set of environmental resources, that is, the occupation of a different adaptive zone.

Most of men are like bacteria,they replicate in thier relationships

DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity.

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

I think, therefore a single fertilized egg cell can replicate itself into trillions of specialized and exquisitely organized cells.

It’ll be decades—and maybe never—before the computer can replicate many of the things that the brain can do in terms of imagination, synthesis, and creativity. That’s because the brain comes genetically programmed with millions of years of abilities honed through evolution. The “science” of decision making that underlies many computer systems remains much less valuable than the “art.

In my travels on the surface, I once met a man who wore his religious beliefs like a badge of honor upon the sleeves of his tunic. "I am a Gondsman!" he proudly told me as we sat beside eachother at a tavern bar, I sipping my wind, and he, I fear, partaking a bit too much of his more potent drink. He went on to explain the premise of his religion, his very reason for being, that all things were based in science, in mechanics and in discovery. He even asked if he could take a piece of my flesh, that he might study it to determine why the skin of the drow elf is black. "What element is missing," he wondered, "that makes your race different from your surface kin?" I think that the Gondsman honestly believed his claim that if he could merely find the various elements that comprised the drow skin, he might affect a change in that pigmentation to make the dark elves more akin to their surface relatives. And, given his devotion, almost fanaticism, it seemed to me as if he felt he could affect a change in more than physical appearance. Because, in his view of the world, all things could be so explained and corrected. How could i even begin to enlighten him to the complexity? How could i show him the variations between drow and surface elf in the very view of the world resulting from eons of walking widely disparate roads? To a Gondsman fanatic, everything can be broken down, taken apart and put back together. Even a wizard's magic might be no more than a way of conveying universal energies - and that, too, might one day be replicated. My Gondsman companion promised me that he and his fellow inventor priests would one day replicate every spell in any wizard's repertoire, using natural elements in the proper combinations. But there was no mention of the discipline any wizard must attain as he perfects his craft. There was no mention of the fact that powerful wizardly magic is not given to anyone, but rather, is earned, day by day, year by year and decade by decade. It is a lifelong pursuit with gradual increase in power, as mystical as it is secular. So it is with the warrior. The Gondsman spoke of some weapon called an arquebus, a tubular missile thrower with many times the power of the strongest crossbow. Such a weapon strikes terror into the heart of the true warrior, and not because he fears that he will fall victim to it, or even that he fears it will one day replace him. Such weapons offend because the true warrior understands that while one is learning how to use a sword, one should also be learning why and when to use a sword. To grant the power of a weapon master to anyone at all, without effort, without training and proof that the lessons have taken hold, is to deny the responsibility that comes with such power. Of course, there are wizards and warriors who perfect their craft without learning the level of emotional discipline to accompany it, and certainly there are those who attain great prowess in either profession to the detriment of all the world - Artemis Entreri seems a perfect example - but these individuals are, thankfully, rare, and mostly because their emotional lacking will be revealed early in their careers, and it often brings about a fairly abrupt downfall. But if the Gondsman has his way, if his errant view of paradise should come to fruition, then all the years of training will mean little. Any fool could pick up an arquebus or some other powerful weapon and summarily destroy a skilled warrior. Or any child could utilize a Gondsman's magic machine and replicate a firebal, perhaps, and burn down half a city. When I pointed out some of my fears to the Gondsman, he seemed shocked - not at the devastating possibilities, but rather, at my, as he put it, arrogance. "The inventions of the priests of Gond will make all equal!" he declared. "We will lift up the lowly peasant

But only through replication can science be the truly error-correcting enterprise that it is supposed to be. Replication allows for the overturning of results, as well as an approach toward truth, and is what science is ultimately about.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like, tears in rain. Time to die.

Vaccine trials are done on healthy individuals. Let’s say they measure the safe rate of replication for a healthy child and then use that same vaccine on a child with a compromised immune system. What appears to happen at times, is that some children have such a severely compromised immune systems that it causes the virus to replicate out of control[68]. Vaccines that are manufactured this way are the rotavirus, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), smallpox and chickenpox vaccines.

So to answer your question, Papa- 'to what end' is my work? I'll be researching how life itself replicates in endless, observable permutations, how life continues rather than ends with the biological organism when it dies. Papa, the science I'll be conducting is the study of life itself.

when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small. In his notebooks he would record curls of hair, eddies of water, and whirls of air, along with some stabs at the math that might underlie such spirals. While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the “Deluge drawings” that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. “I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction,” he replied.

This should not be just another art form for historians to see and appreciate, but an embodiment of powerful, evergreen human philosophy mingled with mythology and science, replicating divine and spiritual precipitation, which must compel human beings through generations to get mesmerised and assimilate it into their lives.

What if someone conducted tens of thousands of hours of rigorous investigation to discover truths about the nature of consciousness? Suppose other people replicated the research over hundreds of years. How amazing would it be not just to have an intellectual understanding of the mind’s potential but also to establish the most rapid and direct way to realize it? That is the science of Buddhism.

But even when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small.

The ancients personified their vision of the subtle forces of nature in myth. Where modern science observes the triad of light, energy, and mass as E=mc2, the ancients mythologized a mystic marriage and birth in three stages: a field or womb of light arises, it swirls as an energy pattern, and physical forms precipitate upon the pattern. The geometer replicates this cosmic configurating process with three tools.

I’m being diplomatic. Many readers will know of the “replication crisis” in psychology, where an alarming percentage of published findings, even some in textbooks, turn out to be hard or impossible for other scientists to independently replicate (including some findings, I admit ruefully, that wound up being cited in my 2017 book, where I should have been more discerning). Thus, this section considers only findings whose broad conclusions have been independently replicated.

Another way is via genetic engineering. Here the germ is inserted into plasmid that has been manipulated by scientists. This type of plasmid is circular segments of DNA extracted from bacteria to serve as a vector. Scientists can add multiple genes and whatever genes they want into this plasmid. In case of vaccines, this includes a genetic piece of the vaccine germ and normally a gene for antibiotic resistance. This means that when the toxic gene is cultured inside the yeast, it has been designed with a new genetic code that makes it resistant to the antibiotic it’s coded for. The gene-plasmid combo is inserted into a yeast cell to be replicated. When the yeast replicates, the DNA from the plasmid is reproduced as a part of the yeast DNA. Once enough cells have been replicated, the genetic material in the new and improved yeast cell is extracted and put into the vaccine. Examples of this vaccine are the acellular pertussis and hepatitis B vaccines. One thing that doesn’t seem to concern scientists is the fact that the manmade genetic combination becomes the vaccine component. This mixture of intended and unintended genetic information may cause our immune system to overreact. This can be especially complicated for a child with compromised immune system. Another concern is that this new genetic code can become integrated with our own genetic material. Yeast, for instance, is very much like human DNA. It shares about one third of our proteins.

The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.

Here are two equations mathematicians have found that also approach the ideal value of Φ. Don’t be scared or anxious about them. Don’t even try to solve these equations. Just look at them. Each is a picture, a mathematical mandala clothing the infinite as it zooms by. Notice how each is composed solely of unity interacting with itself, embedded Monads unfurling as far as we can see in a self-replicating rhythm, like mirrors facing each other whose reflecting image gets smaller and smaller.

Paranormal activity cannot be replicated in a laboratory environment and therefore cannot be studied as closely as a natural science, like chemistry or biology. So the inability to replicate the phenomena makes verification and categorization of paranormal events very difficult and erodes the credibility of the science. After all, if we could summon spirits of the departed consistently and reliably in order to study them, there would be a whole new market in trans-dimensional communications.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism--something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

In many life sciences, including psychology, discovery isn’t a black-and-white issue; it is matter of determining, from one experiment to the next, the theoretical contribution made by various shades of gray. When psychologists set arbitrary criteria (p<.05) on the precise shade of gray required to achieve publication—and hence career success—they also incentivize a host of conscious and unconscious strategies to cross that threshold. In the battle between science and storytelling, there is simply no competition: storytelling wins every time.

In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over. Some of these earliest offspring eventually join forces (one major crane, symbiosis), which leads to multicellularity (another major crane), which leads to the more effective exploration vehicles made possible by sexual reproduction (another major crane), which eventually leads in one species to language and cultural evolution (cranes again), which provide the medium for literature and science and engineering, the latest cranes to emerge, which in turn permits us to “go meta” in a way no other life form can do, reflecting in many ways on who and what we are and how we got here, modeling these processes in plays and novels, theories and computer simulations, and ever-more thinking tools to add to our impressive toolbox. This perspective is so widely unifying and at the same time so generous with detailed insights that one might say it’s a power tool, all on its own. Those who are still strangely repelled by Darwinian thinking must consider the likelihood that if they try to go it alone with only the hand tools of tradition, they will find themselves laboring far from the cutting edge of research on important phenomena as diverse as epidemics and epistemology, biofuels and brain architecture, molecular genetics, music, and morality.

Primitive man, living in communities of restricted extent, providing for his needs by his own production or by direct co-operation, limiting his spiritual interests to personal experience or to simple tradition, surveys and controls the material of his existence more easily and completely than the man of higher culture. In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. In a much wider degree than people are accustomed to realize, modern civilized life—from the economic system which is constantly becoming more and more a credit-economy, to the pursuit of science, in which the majority of investigators must use countless results obtained by others, and not directly subject to verification—depends upon faith in the honor of others. We rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of conceptions, the majority of which presuppose confidence that we have not been deceived. Hence prevarication in modern circumstances becomes something much more devastating, something placing the foundations of life much more in jeopardy, than was earlier the case.

It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented—one that computer scientists haven’t come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address—a page number—for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don’t need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up—or doesn’t—when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly.

My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones.

We underestimate the power of science, and overestimate the power of personal observation. A peer-reviewed, journal-published, replicated report is worth far more than what you see with your own eyes. Our own eyes can deceive us. People can fool themselves, hallucinate, and even go insane. The controls on publication in major journals are more trustworthy than the very fabric of your brain. If you see with your own eyes that the sky is blue, and Science says it is green, then sir, I advise that you trust in Science. This is not what most scientists will tell you, of course; but I think it is pragmatically true. Because in real life, what happens is that your eyes have a little malfunction and decide that the sky is green, and science will tell you that the sky is blue.

We can assume that by now the Rasu have captured and analyzed zettabytes of government data from Namino. There’s zero chance they don’t possess the locations of every Dominion world. Why haven’t they attacked us somewhere else yet?” An uneasy silence answered Maris. Nika was reluctant to break it, but hiding from the truth did them no good. “Because the Rasu don’t fear us.” Dashiel frowned at her. “But we destroyed their entire presence in this galaxy.” “We did. And by now, they realize that we accomplished it using smoke and mirrors and are unlikely to be able to replicate the feat anytime soon. They don’t fear us, which means they can afford to take their time, methodically dismantling our civilization block by block, then planet by planet.” Lance arched an eyebrow. “Then we need to make them fear us again.

One recent case highlighted by Dan Simons relates again to the work of Yale psychologist John Bargh. In 2012, Bargh and colleague Idit Shalev published a study claiming that lonelier people prefer warmer baths and showers, thereby compensating for a lack of “social warmth” through physical warmth.44 In 2014, psychologist Brent Donnellan and colleagues reported a failure to replicate this finding—and not just in a single experiment but across nine experiments and more than 3,000 participants, over 30 times the sample size of the original study.45 Despite this failure to replicate, as well as the presence of unexplained anomalies in the original data, Bargh and Shalev refused to retract their original paper. In many other sciences, a false discovery of this magnitude would automatically trigger excision of the original work from the scientific record. In psychology, unreliability is business as usual.

But Homo sapiens’ dependency on social communication and education is as much of a curse as it is a gift. On the flip side of the coin, it is education’s fault that religious myths and fake news propagate so easily in human societies. From the earliest age, our brains trustfully absorb the tales we are told, whether they are true or false. In a social context, our brains lower their guard; we stop acting like budding scientists and become mindless lemmings. This can be good—as when we trust the knowledge of our science teachers, and thus avoid having to replicate every experiment since Galileo’s time! But it can also be detrimental, as when we collectively propagate an unreliable piece of “wisdom” inherited from our forebears. It is on this basis that doctors foolishly practiced bloodletting and cupping therapies for centuries, without ever testing their actual impact. (In case you are wondering, both are actually harmful in the vast majority of diseases.)

a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.”27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?

Former member of CSICOP Marcello Truzzi summed up the history of laboratory parapsychology: As proponents of anomalies produce stronger evidence, critics have sometimes moved the goal posts further away. . . . To convince scientists of what had merely been supported by widespread but weak anecdotal evidence, parapsychologists moved psychical research into the laboratory. When experimental results were presented, designs were criticized. When protocols were improved, a “fraud proof” or “critical experiment” was demanded. When those were put forward, replications were demanded. When those were produced, critics argued that new forms of error might be the cause (such as the “file drawer” error that could result from unpublished negative studies). When meta-analyses were presented to counter that issue, these were discounted as controversial, and ESP was reduced to being some present but unspecified “error some place” in the form of what Ray Hyman called the “dirty test tube argument” (claiming dirt was in the tube making the seeming psi result a mere artifact). And in one instance, when the scoffer found no counter-explanations, he described the result as a “mere anomaly” not to be taken seriously so just belonging on a puzzle page. The goal posts have now been moved into a zone where some critics hold unfalsifiable positions.30

The unification of our understanding of life with our understanding of matter and energy was the greatest scientific achievement of the second half of the twentieth century. One of its many consequences was to pull the rug out from under social scientists like Kroeber and Lowie who had invoked the “sound scientific method” of placing the living and nonliving in parallel universes. We now know that cells did not always come from other cells and that the emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one. Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a nonliving part of the physical world, and may be understood as collections of molecular machinery—fantastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless. This leaves one wall standing in the landscape of knowledge, the one that twentieth-century social scientists guarded so jealously. It divides matter from mind, the material from the spiritual, the physical from the mental, biology from culture, nature from society, and the sciences from the social sciences, humanities, and arts. The division was built into each of the doctrines of the official theory: the blank slate given by biology versus the contents inscribed by experience and culture, the nobility of the savage in the state of nature versus the corruption of social institutions, the machine following inescapable laws versus the ghost that is free to choose and to improve the human condition. But this wall, too, is falling.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

Neuroimaging studies show the PFC reining in more emotional brain regions in the name of doing (or thinking) the right thing. Stick a volunteer in a brain scanner and flash up pictures of faces. And in a depressing, well-replicated finding, flash up the face of someone of another race and in about 75 percent of subjects, there is activation of the amygdala, the brain region central to fear, anxiety, and aggression.[*] In under a tenth of a second.[*] And then the PFC does the harder thing. In most of those subjects, a few seconds after the amygdala activates, the PFC kicks in, turning off the amygdala. It’s a delayed frontocortical voice—“Don’t think that way. That’s not who I am.” And who are the folks in which the PFC doesn’t muzzle the amygdala? People whose racism is avowedly, unapologetically explicit—“That is who I am.”[13] In another experimental paradigm, a subject in a brain scanner plays an online game with two other people—each is represented by a symbol on the screen, forming a triangle. They toss a virtual ball around—the subject presses one of two buttons, determining which of the two symbols the ball is tossed to; the other two toss it to each other, toss it back to the subject. This goes on for a while, everyone having a fine time, and then, oh no, the other two people stop tossing the ball to the subject. It’s the middle-school nightmare: “They know I’m a dork.” The amygdala rapidly activates, along with the insular cortex, a region associated with disgust and distress. And then, after a delay, the PFC inhibits these other regions—“Get this in perspective; this is just a stupid game.” In a subset of individuals, however, the PFC doesn’t activate as much, and the amygdala and insular cortex just keep going, as the subject feels more subjective distress. Who are these impaired individuals? Teenagers—the PFC isn’t up to the task yet of dismissing social ostracism as meaningless. There you have it.[*]

One key characteristic of structure is its richness. To illustrate, recall the comparison that John Rawls drew between checkers and chess when he was describing the Aristotelian principle (see page 386). Both games are played on a board with 64 squares, but they have different structures. Checkers has one kind of piece, while chess has six different kinds of pieces. The movement of any checker piece is restricted to a single square per turn unless it is capturing, while movement in chess is different for each piece. In checkers, the goal is to capture all the opponents’ pieces. In chess, the goal is to trap one particular piece. The structure of chess is objectively richer than the structure of checkers. It is no coincidence that chess has thousands of books written about tactics and strategy for every aspect of the game while checkers has a fraction of that number. The nature of accomplishment in checkers and chess is also objectively different, as reflected in their relative places in Western culture.[1] I measure the richness of a structure by three aspects: principles, craft, and tools. The scientific method offers convenient examples. Conceptually, a scientific experiment proceeds according to principles such as replicability, falsifiability, and the role of the hypothesis that apply across different scientific disciplines. The actual conduct of a classic scientific experiment involves craft—the generation of a hypothesis to be tested or a topic to be explored, the creation of the methods for doing so, and meticulous observance of protocols and procedures during the actual work. The details of craft differ not only across disciplines but within disciplines. They also have a family resemblance, in the sense that a meticulous scientist behaves in ways that are recognizable to scientists in every field—“meticulous” being one of the defining characteristics of craft practiced at a high level. Tools play a double role. Sometimes they are created in direct response to needs generated by principles and craft—accurate thermometers are an example—but at least as often, a tool turns out to have unanticipated uses that alter both principles and craft, independently expanding the realm of things a discipline can achieve. An example is the invention of the diffraction grating to study spectra of light, which 40 years later turned out to enable astronomers to study the composition of the stars.

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there, denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing-hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times, not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces, the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements from the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building blocks of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed. Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generation of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. Congealing and warming, the Earth released methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the first oceans. Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the primitive atmosphere; the fragments fell back together into more and more complex forms, which dissolved into the early oceans. After a while the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clay. And one day a molecule arose that quite by accident was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth. As time passed, more elaborate and more accurate self replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun. Single-celled plants evolved, and life began generating its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free living forms bonded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell. One celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that land could support life. Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born live instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early ocean coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.

Sex thus represents a defending mechanism of long-term biodiversity, versus cloning that would trend strongly toward competition. Although competitive traits never go away, their intensity and distribution are moderated, and sexuality powerfully lowers the curve of increasing aggressive tendency within any species. Sex as a key principle of biotic intimacy is a safety valve in nature against an ultimate, self-destructive integrity of aggressive replicators that would diminish life's complexity and turn evolutionary expression toward a brutish simplicity. In the long run, sex may protect against the threat of bottlenecking gene pools with populations envisioned by Tennyson-"red in tooth and claw"-having impoverished endowment for survival in a world of change on many fronts.

The notion that electromagnetic energy exists as discrete packets of energy rather than a continuous stream became the foundation on which physicists erected what is inarguably the most successful (and strangest) theory in the history of science. The laws of quantum physics not only replicate all the successes of the classical theory they supplanted (that is, a quantum calculation produces an answer at least as accurate as a classical one in problems ranging from the fall of an apple to the flight of a spaceship). They also succeed where the laws of classical physics fail. It is quantum physics, not classical physics, that explains the burning of stars, accounts for the structure of elementary particles, predicts the order of elements in the periodic table, and describes the physics of the newborn universe. Although devised to explain atomic and electromagnetic phenomena, quantum physics has “yielded a deep understanding of chemistry and the solid state,” noted the physicist Daniel Greenberger, a leading quantum theorist: quantum physics spawned quantum technologies, including transistors, lasers, semiconductors, light-emitting diodes, scans, PET scans, and MRI machines.

DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity. Oddly, the lack of reliability and validity did not keep the DSM-V from meeting its deadline for publication, despite the near-universal consensus that it represented no improvement over the previous diagnostic system. 29 Could the fact that the APA had earned $ 100 million on the DSM-IV and is slated to take in a similar amount with the DSM-V (because all mental health practitioners, many lawyers, and other professionals will be obliged to purchase the latest edition)

There are a few rules we can follow. We should be skeptical of single studies. That should be the case even if we have every reason to trust the lab. Until the work is replicated under a variety of conditions, we should suspend judgment. We should be skeptical of studies that have no controls. We should not treat observational studies as proving causal connections, no matter how strong the correlations that are discovered. We should trust consensus science, even though the majority is not always right. Scientists will

There are a few rules we can follow. We should be skeptical of single studies. That should be the case even if we have every reason to trust the lab. Until the work is replicated under a variety of conditions, we should suspend judgment. We should be skeptical of studies that have no controls. We should not treat observational studies as proving causal connections, no matter how strong the correlations that are discovered. We should trust consensus science, even though the majority is not always right.

More generally, it is widely recognized that there is a crisis in the field of biomedicine, characterized by a “culture of hyper-competitiveness.” In this environment, scientists may feel the need to overstate the importance of their work in order to attract attention and obtain funding. Other symptoms of this climate are a “lack of transparent reporting of results” and an increasing frequency of published results that cannot be replicated.8

Humans can imitate what Nature does, but never can we exactly replicate what she creates.

If we take a science such as experimental physics, where studies tend to have high statistical power, methods are well defined and de facto preregistered, then the failure to reproduce a previous result is considered a major cause for concern. But in a weaker science where lax statistical standards and questionable research practices are the norm, attempts to reproduce prior work will often fail, and it should therefore come as no surprise that retraction is rare.

For example, Gross and Levitt have the kind of “mental imperialism,” as John Michel once called it, which just can’t resist ridiculing all non-Western cultures and their non-Western sciences. They dismiss all alternative healing, especially from the Orient, with a hoity-toity arrogance only equaled by Christian theologians writing about Oriental religions; and this seems especially narrow and provincial in 1995, since the American Medical Association, once a hotbed of that kind of prejudice, has grown increasingly open-minded in the past 20 years and prints more and more studies in their Journal in which researchers investigate alternative therapies scientifically, instead of just dismissing them with racist jokes like Gross and Levitt. (The A.M.A. has even printed studies in which alternative medical theories seem to work (!), although of course this research requires replication before it will become generally accepted.)

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

Assembler? Is that like a replicator? Do you know Star Trek?” “I’ve seen it. Yes, it’s very similar, but a bit more limited. Science, not wishful thinking.

Why would they support something so avant garde? So theoretical? Where is the replication in that? Keep it simple; keep it reportable; keep it digestible. That was the key to success on the pre-paved highway of life, but he could not be that stereotype.

Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born. As Bloom later told reporters: “We were looking for exceptional kids, but what we found were exceptional conditions.” This was a cornerstone finding, replicated and expanded and potent. The idea settled an uneasy corner of the nature/nurture debate: it democratized expertise. Provided the right environment and the proper encouragement, it meant that everyone had a shot at perfection. It meant there were no “chosen few.

Measuring replication rates across different experiments requires that research be reviewed in some fashion. Research reviews can be classified into four types. A type 1 review simply identifies and discusses recent developments in a field, usually focusing on a few exemplar experiments. Such reviews are often found in popular-science magazines such as Scientific American. They are also commonly used in skeptical reviews of psi research because one or two carefully selected exemplars can provide easy targets to pick apart. The type 2 review uses a few research results to highlight or illustrate a new theory or to propose a new theoretical framework for understanding a phenomenon. Again, the review is not designed to be comprehensive but only to illustrate a general theme. Type 3 reviews organize and synthesize knowledge from various areas of research. Such narrative reviews are not comprehensive, because the entire pool of combined studies from many disciplines is typically too large to consider individually. So again, a few exemplars of the “best” studies are used to illustrate the point of the synthesis. Type 4 is the integrative review, or meta-analysis, which is a structured technique for exhaustively analyzing a complete body of experiments. It draws generalizations from a set of observations about each experiment.1 Integration Meta-analysis has been described as “a method of statistical analysis wherein the units of analysis are the results of independent studies, rather than the responses of individual subjects.”2 In a single experiment, the raw data points are typically the participants’ individual responses. In meta-analysis, the raw data points are the results of separate experiments.

Reproducibility is not a binary condition: a scientific report may not be all right or all wrong. One part of a multipart report may not replicate, while other parts do. Or a replicated result might match the original result qualitatively though not quantitatively, as was the case in many of the RPP experiments. It is often hard to classify reports as “reproducible” or “irreproducible.

Science depends on being able to repeat a finding, again and again, before it's declared true. It's about controlling the variables. And that is simply impossible in a séance room. Results are never replicable, strictly. The experimenter isn't in charge. Even the medium isn't in charge. The spirits decide if and when they'll come through, and what they'll do when they get here.

Computers are no longer programmed; they teach themselves. A quine is a non-empty computer program that takes no input and produces a copy of its source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are Self-replicating programs, Self-reproducing programs, and Self-copying programs.

As a fusion of music and therapy, music therapy is at once an art, a science, and an interpersonal process. As an art, it is concerned with subjectivity, individuality, creativity, and beauty. As a science, it is concerned with objectivity, universality, replicability, and truth. As an interpersonal process it is concerned with empathy, intimacy, communication, reciprocity, and role relationships.

Inspired by Sharpe’s work, Fouse in 1969 recommended that Mellon launch a passive fund that would try to replicate only one of the big stock market indices, like the S&P 500 of America’s biggest companies. It got nixed by Mellon’s management. In the spring of 1970, he then proposed a fund that would systematically invest according to a dividend-based model devised by John Burr Williams—who had nearly two decades earlier inspired Markowitz’s work—but that too was summarily squashed. “Goddammit Fouse, you’re trying to turn my business into a science,” his boss told him.14

Usually, when scientists measure characteristics of organisms—whether plants or animals—they look at the average of the tendencies of the entire group. For at least the last hundred years in plant biology, individual plants within a species have been seen as replicants. No individual trait matters to science, which only looks at the average of the traits of the entire population. If one individual falls too far outside the average, it tends to get discarded from the study as an outlier. “What individuals do is seen as just noise,” Karban explains. But his work with sagebrush throws away the relevance of averages. Personality research treats individual differences as valuable data. Each one is a point on the spectrum of behavior. The noise becomes the signal. “This is the opposite approach: It’s paying attention to the variation among individuals.

Though other cultures-like the Sumerian, the Mayan, and the Indic-coupled human destiny with long vistas of abstract calendar time, the essential contribution of the Renascence was to relate the cumulative results of history to the variety of cultural achievements that marked the successive generations. By unburying statues, monuments, buildings, cities, by reading old books and inscriptions, by re-entering a long-abandoned world of ideas, these new explorers in time became aware of fresh potentialities in their own existence. These pioneers of the mind invented a time-machine more wonderful than H.G. Wells' technological contraption. At a moment when the new mechanical world-picture had no place for 'time' except as a function of movement in space, historic time-duration, in Henri Bergson's sense, which includes persistence through replication, imitation, and memory-began to play a conscious part in day-to-day choices. If the living present could be visibly transformed, or at least deliberately modified from Gothic to a formalized Classic structure, so could the future be remolded, too. Historic time could be colonized and cultivated, and human culture itself became a collective artifact. The sciences actually profited by this historic restoration, getting a fresh impetus from Thales, Democritus, Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria.

The air is pure here, scented only with perfume as I gaze around me at my chamber. Seated at my mirror, I look almost as a courtesan might once have done. My hair is long and a deep, natural red. It’s a colour women once tried to replicate but never got quite right. It’s long and sleek, my eyes a pale blue, like the sky reflected off the water in the earliest hours of morning. The water is no longer that colour now – it’s as if night never lifted. The invaders have darkened the skies with clouds that shift and roil like a witch’s vile brew. I shift my thoughts away from it and it becomes a memory, easily forgotten for the moment as I watch myself in the mirror.

THE DSM-V: A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD OF “DIAGNOSES” When DSM-V was published in May 2013 it included some three hundred disorders in its 945 pages. It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder,26 Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder.27 Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on.28 This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye. Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-V psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origin of many of the problems it identifies, its “diagnoses” describe surface phenomena that completely ignore the underlying causes. Even before DSM-V was released, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the results of validity tests of various new diagnoses, which indicated that the DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity. Oddly, the lack of reliability and validity did not keep the DSM-V from meeting its deadline for publication, despite the near-universal consensus that it represented no improvement over the previous diagnostic system.29 Could the fact that the APA had earned $100 million on the DSM-IV and is slated to take in a similar amount with the DSM-V (because all mental health practitioners, many lawyers, and other professionals will be obliged to purchase the latest edition) be the reason we have this new diagnostic system?

When we reject unreal things in advance, we never can observe see them. Focusing can lead us to stray. Aliens may be replicated in our cells. 

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system—much less a brain—the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.

where should one focus the study of contemporary phenomena? The nomothetic social scientists were located primarily in the same five countries as the historians, and in the same way studied primarily their own countries (or at most they made comparisons among the five countries). This was to be sure socially rewarded, but in addition the nomothetic social scientists put forward a methodological argument to justify this choice. They said that the best way to avoid bias was to use quantitative data, and that such data were most likely to be located in their own countries in the immediate present. Furthermore, they argued that if we assume the existence of general laws governing social behavior, it would not matter where one studied these phenomena, since what was true in one place and at one time was true in all places at all times. Why not then study phenomena for which one had the most reliable data—that is, the most quantified and replicable data? Social scientists did have one further problem. The four disciplines together (history, economics, sociology, and political science) studied in effect only a small portion of the world. But in the nineteenth century, the five countries were imposing colonial rule on many other parts of the world, and were engaged in commerce and sometimes in warfare with still other parts of the world. It seemed important to study the rest of the world as well. Still, the rest of the world seemed somehow different, and it seemed inappropriate to use four West-oriented disciplines to study parts of the world that were not considered “modern.” As a result, two additional disciplines arose.

Science works through replication, rectification and modification. But when it comes to religion, people simply tend to accept the theoretical preachers and their claims of historical God experiences without a single question. If there has been one experience in this world in any branch of knowledge, it absolutely follows that that experience will be repeated eternally. If they are not repeated through natural processes, the thinking humanity would have no way but to disprove that such an experience ever occurred in the history.

People say success is a science and there are laws for success, like a science. That is the most unscientific thing to ever say. If something cannot be regularly replicated under similar conditions, it’s far from a science, unless we are talking about quantum physics, which is clearly not what the “success is a science” people are referring to!

Students who made significant progress didn’t have better teachers. They just happened to have the same teacher for two years in a row. The practice is called looping. Instead of staying in the same grade and teaching new students each year, teachers move up a grade with their students. The benefits of looping aren’t specific to North Carolina. A separate team of economists replicated the study with nearly a million elementary and middle schoolers in Indiana—and found the same results.

During the centuries that science has fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus (aka the common cold), only zinc has repeatedly proven its efficacy in peer-reviewed studies. Zinc impedes viral replication, prophylaxing against colds and abbreviating their duration

There are no commuters, no children jostling for school buses, no taxis, no old men in hats driving in the centre of the road. It should feel like heaven but, as Nelson drives through the old city gates, he's reminded of science fiction films where towns have been taken over by lizard people or filled with replicants. If this is the future, he doesn't like it.

Stick with science, trust what has been proven and replicated numerous times, you can’t go wrong with that.

Humans replicating their supernatural powers through machines, and gradually becoming powerless.

The Monopoly experiment wasn’t the most rigorous science ever, and Piff never published it—although the study was later replicated by others and used in his popular TED Talk, “Does Money Make You Mean?” But his observations were consistent with a large and growing body of work by Piff and various colleagues. Inside and outside the lab, in a host of experiments deploying a multitude of setups, these researchers have found that people of higher socioeconomic status, compared with those lower down the ladder, are more self-oriented and less attuned to the needs of others. They are more willing to behave unethically in their own self-interest: to lie during negotiations, misreport the results of a dice game that results in a prize, or express willingness to steal from an employer—pilfering food from a restaurant where they work, for instance, or taking a ream of office paper for home use. “Lower-class” participants proved equally willing to do such things only when the goal was to help someone else, such as swiping the restaurant food for a hungry friend.

I was struck, during COVID-19’s early months, that America’s Doctor, apparently preoccupied with his single vaccine solution, did little in the way of telling Americans how to bolster their immune response. He never took time during his daily White House briefings from March to May 2020 to instruct Americans to avoid tobacco (smoking and e-cigarettes/vaping double death rates from COVID); to get plenty of sunlight and to maintain adequate vitamin D levels (“Nearly 60 percent of patients with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient upon hospitalization, with men in the advanced stages of COVID-19 pneumonia showing the greatest deficit”); or to diet, exercise, and lose weight (78 percent of Americans hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese). Quite the contrary, Dr. Fauci’s lockdowns caused Americans to gain an average of two pounds per month and to reduce their daily steps by 27 percent. He didn’t recommend avoiding sugar and soft drinks, processed foods, and chemical residues, all of which amplify inflammation, compromise immune response, and disrupt the gut biome which governs the immune system. During the centuries that science has fruitlessly sought remedies against coronavirus (aka the common cold), only zinc has repeatedly proven its efficacy in peer-reviewed studies. Zinc impedes viral replication, prophylaxing against colds and abbreviating their duration. The groaning shelves that commercial pharmacies devote to zinc-based cold remedies attest to its extraordinary efficacy. Yet Anthony Fauci never advised Americans to increase zinc uptake following exposure to infection.

There are several lines of evidence that suggest that men might, in fact, be able to detect when women ovulate (Symons, 1995). First, during ovulation, women’s skin becomes suffused with blood. This corresponds to the “glow” that women sometimes appear to have, a healthy reddening of the cheeks. Second, women’s skin lightens slightly during ovulation as compared with other times of the menstrual cycle—a cue universally thought to be a sexual attractant (Frost, 2011; van den Berghe & Frost, 1986). A cross-cultural survey found that “of the 51 societies for which any mention of native skin preferences… is made, 47 state a preference for the lighter end of the locally represented spectrum, although not necessarily for the lightest possible skin color” (van den Berghe & Frost, 1986, p. 92). Third, during ovulation, women’s level of circulating estrogen increases, which produces a corresponding decrease in women’s WHR (Symons, 1995, p. 93). Fourth, ovulating women are touched more often by men in singles bars (Grammer, 1996). Fifth, men find the body odor of women to be more attractive and pleasant smelling during the follicular (fertile) stage of the menstrual cycle (Gildersleeve, Haselton, Larson, & Pillsworth, 2012; Havlicek, Dvorakova, Bartos, & Flegr, 2005; Singh & Bronstad, 2001). Sixth, men who smell T-shirts worn by ovulating women display a subsequent rise in testosterone levels compared to men who smell shirts worn by non-ovulating women or shirts with a control scent (Miller & Maner, 2010), although a subsequent study failed to replicate this effect (Roney & Simmons, 2012). Seventh, there are vocal cues to ovulation—women’s voices rise in pitch, in the attractive feminine direction, at ovulation (Bryant & Haselton, 2009). Eighth, women’s faces are judged by both sexes to be more attractive during the fertile than during the luteal phase (Puts et al., 2013; Roberts et al., 2004). Ninth, men perceive their romantic partners to be more attractive around ovulation (Cobey, Buunk, Pollet, Klipping, & Roberts, 2013). Tenth, women report feeling more attractive and desirable, as well as an increased interest in sex, around the time of ovulation (R ö der, Brewer, & Fink, 2009). And 11th, a study of professional lap dancers working in gentlemen’s clubs found that ovulating women received significantly higher tips than women in the non-ovulation phases of their cycle (Miller, Tybur, & Jordan, 2007).