Which Scientific Advances Are You Looking Forward to the Most?

As for me, I'm eagerly awaiting the advent of two major scientific advances:

1. Teleportation. It will allow people to cover huge distances in matter of minutes. Imagine what that will do for all those people who are separated from their loved ones because they work in different places. I could work here but live in Philadelphia, for example. That would be pretty fantastic. Of course, teleportation will never be free or uncontrollable. I'm sure there will be terminals where you'll have to pass through document checks and customs and pay a fee, but the mere possibility of this kind of travel will be amazing.

2. Human cloning. This will be an invention which will finally bring about a decisive victory for feminism and gay rights. Women will no longer have to go through the trauma and danger of pregnancy and childbirth. Men will be able to have their own children without being at the mercy of whether a woman wants to carry their child to term. Gay couples will be able to have kids easily. No wonder that conservatives are so terrified of cloning. 

Which scientific advances are you looking forward to the most and why?

Another Funny Study

I have no idea why I keep coming across these hilarious scientific studies today, but here you go.

A group of researchers just proved that thinking about money makes most people unhappy and less able to enjoy life:

Psychologist Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liège in Belgium and his colleagues divided 374 adults, ranging from custodians to senior administrators, into two randomly assigned groups. The first group was shown a picture of a stack of money; the control group was shown the same picture blurred beyond recognition. Then the participants were given psychological tests to measure their ability to savor pleasant experiences. The results showed that people who had been shown the money scored significantly lower. A second test showed even more dramatically how the thought of cash spoils savoring. Participants were given a piece of chocolate after being shown a picture of money or a blurred photograph. Then an observer timed how long the person savored the morsel of chocolate. Women savored the chocolate longer than men, but regardless of gender, individuals shown the picture of money beforehand spent significantly less time savoring the chocolate—on average, 32 seconds versus 45 seconds.

I have an explanation for this phenomenon as well. When people see a picture of money, they often theink not about money per se, but about their own lack thereof. Show me a picture of a wad of bills, and I immediately remember that I forgot to pay the electricity bill and the cell phone bill will be due in a week. Is it any wonder that this kind of thoughts makes one less interested in any savoring chocolate or anything else?

Some scientists spend tons of money and resources on proving things that are truly self-evident.

A Lot of Alcohol Is Better Than None

Turns out it's better to be a heavy drinker than to abstain from alcohol completely:

Even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables - socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on - the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

Researchers will, of course, look for their own explanations of these findings. For me, however, the reasons for this phenomenon are clear: people who prissily abstain from alcohol altogether are as likely to deprive themselves from other good things in life such as, for example, sex. So it's no wonder that their bodies give up on this pleasure-free lifestyle sooner rather than later.

Another Instance of Pseudo-Scientific Stupidity

This is what science has come to nowadays:

Want lots of kids? If you're a man, find yourself a neurotic mate. And if you're a woman, look for a gregarious guy. That’s because extroverted men and needy, anxious women are the most fertile coupling, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers looked at a population in Senegal for the study. That African nation is run a little differently from the U.S. - its residents practice polygamy and typically don’t believe in birth control. But whether in Senegal or America, extroverted men tend to make more money and presumably have more sex. And more frequent sex leads to more babies. The findings, says study author Prof. Virpi Lummaa of Sheffield University in the U.K., suggest “that the link between extroversion and number of children in men is driven by the effects of extroversion on the probability of belonging to the high social class.”

I was going to comment on this new bout of pseudo-scientific barbarity but then thought better of it. This rubbish definitely speaks for itself.


This is what happens in societies that glorify stupidity. This is what we will have in place of science if the disturbing trends in the academic world continue unchecked.

Gendered Science

It's funny to observe how some so-called scientists begin their research from ridiculous gender stereotypes that have been interiorized to the extent where they start looking real. Here is the result of such profoundly unscientific approach:

A nasal spray can make men more in tune with other people's feelings, say a team of German and UK researchers. They found that inhaling the "cuddle hormone" oxytocin made men just as empathetic as women.

I guess we are supposed to gather from such statements that wihout this nasal spray (a nasal spray, of all things? Seriously?) men are not in tune with people's feelings and have no empathy. These are, of course, not the most outlandish suggestions this article makes about men. Almost immediately, it makes a connection between this non-empathetic condition and schizophrenia:

Professor Kendrick said the oxytocin spray may prove to be useful in people with conditions associated with reduced social approachability and social withdrawal, such as schizophrenia.

Basically, the idea that is promoted here seems to be that schizophrenia is just a small step away from being male. If men go long enough without this miraculous nasal spray, their biological tendency towards being non-feeling might take them all the way to schizophrenia. Female schizophrenics are, of course, left out of the picture. So are non-cuddly and non-empathetic women. Any kind of reality that does not fold itself neatly into the strictly gendered worldview of these pseudo-scientists is simply discarded. Their gall is such that they do not think twice before presenting schizophrenia as a "male" disease.

These sexist studies based on assuming that learned social skills are predicated on gender marginalize significant groups of people of both genders. Sociable, sensitive, empathetic men are branded as somehow less male. Non-cuddly, unsociable women are seen as less female. All this, of course, ends up placing an additional burden an autistic women. As it is, the patriarchal gender roles mandating that all women be weepy, sentimental, overly attached creatures deny female autistics any inclusion into this socially constructed kind of womanhood.

Autism, the favorite bugbear of mass culture today, is also addressed in this strange study. It was always completely obvious to me that all the stupid "Autism Speaks" campaigns and all the mass hysteria surrounding autism were paid for by pharmaceutical companies. These companies are interested in presenting autism not as a way of being that has a right to exist but as something that can be if not cured, then "managed." In this particular case, the suggestion is that we should spray this junk up our noses in other to "learn" to relate  better to other people. Whether most autistics are actually interested in learning how to be more "cuddly" is never addressed.

For such a short article, it packs a very powerful ideological punch. First, men in general are presented as biologically insensitive, non-empathetic beings who are physiologically one step away from schizophrenia. This serves the purpose of marginalizing men who have no problem with empathy, while presenting insensitive men as truly masculine. Then, the myth of general female cuddliness is reinforced. And to top it all off, autistics are used once again to fulfill the goals of pharmaceutical companies.

It's truly sad to see what passes for science these days.

Anti-depressants Don't Work. Is Anybody Really Surprised?

A new study by Professor Robert J. DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated that

Antidepressant medications likely provide little or no benefit to people with mild or moderate depression. . . Rather, the mere act of seeing a doctor, discussing symptoms and learning about depression probably triggers the improvements many patients experience while on medication.

Really? There actually needed to be a study demonstrating this? Even the relentless pharmaceutical companies have recognized that anti-depressants are useless. These powerful drug-pushing concerns have been brainwashing the public for decades with their mantra of "depression is a chemical imbalance in

your brain which we will cure by a prescription medication. Or two. Or three, if you are stupid enough to buy into our advertisement of an anti-depressant on top of another anti-depressant taking care of the residual symptoms of yet another anti-depressant."
 
If you read the entire article I quoted, you will see how apologetic Dr. DeRubeis sounds about his findings. All he is saying is that if you feel depressed, it makes sense to discuss this with somebody instead of guzzling crippling chemicals. To the public zombified by the endless ati-depressant commercials the scientist's message might come as a huge surprise. Still, I'm glad that finally somebody dared to publish findings that are likely to cut into the huge profits by the nasty pharmaceutical companies.

Surprise! Sex Is Not Psychologically Damaging

It always makes me laugh when people go all wide-eyed and self-righteous and start telling me that the American society is "sexually permissive," "porned," and "raunchy." These are the people who believe that a lot of talking about sex somehow equals having a lot of sex, which, of course, is silly and untrue. A recent study on the psychological effects of casual sex is a perfect example of how insane the sex-based discourse is in this country.

This is how the study in question announces the context of the research:

Speculation in public discourse suggests that sexual encounters outside a committed romantic relationship may be emotionally damaging for young people, and federal abstinence education policy has required teaching that sexual activity outside of a marital relationship is likely to have harmful psychological consequences.

So the researches set out to prove that casual sex does not damage the participants psychologically (even though it obviously does a lot of damage to the sex-deprived journalists and members of the public, who cannot get over the idea that somebody somewhere is actually having sex and maybe even - the horror! the horror! - enjoting it.)

The results of this study were not surprising: casual sex or "sexual activity outside of a marital relationship" does not cause psychological damage. Why it is necessary to waste resources and time on proving something that is so obvious is beyond my comprehension. Every sane individual must surely know that it's the absence of sex that causes grave psychological harm. It is sad that scientists are forced to dedicate themselves to proving self-evident things simply because a large group of sexually repressed maniacs has colonized public discourse.

Scientific Sexism

Chauvinism pervades every single area of our lives to an incredible degree. Even scientists, whose job is to discover and report objective data, prefer to push their patriarchal ideology instead. A recent article in Science Daily is a perfect example of that.

The article is titled "Unnatural Selection: Birth Control Pills May Alter Choice Of Partners." Its main goal is to bash the most important scientific breakthrough of the XXth century: the birth control pill. Many patriarchally-minded people hate the pill because it liberated women from having their lives controlled by their biology (as I discuss in my last post.) So they come up with studies which are aimed at scaring women off of the pill.

The main problem with taking oral contraception is that it will destroy your personal life. Giving birth to an unwanted child every year of your life, of course, will not do that. But taking the pill definitely will. So how does the oral contraception damage our lives? According to the article, by "interfering with a woman's ability to choose, compete for and retain her preferred mate." Women who are on the pill, the article claims, are less likely to prefer "men showing dominance and male-male competitiveness." Of course, female interest towards domineering jerks is diminishing (which in my book is great). This is a natural process for a society that is trying to move away from patriarchal stereotypes. The only group of people who might find this tendency scary is domineering men. So, in reality, the pill doesn't prevent women from "retaining their preferred mate." What happens is that domineering losers cannot retain a woman in a new reality where women aren't tied forever to these idiots by constant child-bearing.


In order to sell their idiotic propaganda to women, these pseudo-scientists tell us that if we dare to mess with nature's design that destines us to be perennially pregnant, we will not be able to find us a man: "The authors also speculate that the use of oral contraceptives may influence a woman's ability to attract a mate by reducing attractiveness to men, thereby disrupting her ability to compete with normally cycling women for access to mate."   I have no idea since when specialists in Animal and Plant Sciences, as these pseudo-scientists are, qualify to talk about purely sociological issues such as mating and dating. But from personal experience of someone who has been on the pill for 15 years, I can tell these stupid women-haters that they can relax. My attractiveness hasn't suffered and I have never in my life had to compete with any women ("normal" or otherwise) for access to men. Somehow, men never give me the chance and just keep competing for me, as annoying as it is to me.

Girls and Math

It's weird that an actual study was needed to finally prove that if girls do worse in sciences it's because of societal conditioning and that there is no biological reason for it. But now that we have such a study, people like Harvard's former President Larry Summers (who is now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama) might stop claiming (like he did in 2005) that women are biologically conditioned to suck at sciences.

At Yale, we petitioned President Levin to denounce Summers for this blatantly chauvinistic statement. But, of course, he refused to even hear us out. These die-hard chauvinists always stick together. It's sad to know that President Obama would choose such an individual to play a role in the government.

Science and Religion

John Gray (as quoted by Žižek) makes the following interesting observation about science and religion interchanging their roles in contemporary society: "Science alone has the power to silence heretics. . . Like the Church in the past, it has the power to destroy, or marginalize, indepnedent thinkers... For us, science is the refuge from the uncertainties, promising - and in some measure delivering - the miracle of freedom from thought, while churches have become sanctuaries of doubt."

As paradoxical as this might sound, there is a lot of truth in this statement. If you ever tried mentioning the words "theory of evolution" to a biologist, you'd know that the experience is not much better than mentioning the words "the right to an abortion" to a Christian fundamentalist. People get very aggressive and start screaming "It is not a theory!!" in a way that shows a lot of emotional involvement with the subject.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher, warned against an excessively narrow specialization of scientists in the 20ies of last century. I wish thinkers like Žižek were familiar with and incorporated into their work not only the French and the Spanish predecessors but also some Hispanic philosophers. But this is cultural hegemony for you.