More Bunk Science

Presumably like getting creationists to tell the truth and not just make up stuff about evolution?TTFN,WK

WK, those are really just empty words, and completely meaningless to the discussion. Those kind of silly things shouldn't even be allowed to be posted here, and not even worthy of you, as someone who presumably takes themselves seriously as a scientist.I asked a serious question, can you show in anyway that people who have less symmetrical faces are disadvantaged or less capable of reproducing? Also I asked, are we evolving away from crooked faces, if natural selection selects against them?

But you predicated it on what can only be called a lie. When you are arguing from a completely false basis, as you have been for pretty much this entire thread, how can we be expected to take anything you say seriously? Can you show where the paper makes such a claim? As it happens, I can show you studies that say that (see below) but it isn't germane to what the paper you have yet to coherently criticise says. That isn't a reason, it is a question and one that you certainly haven't tried to find out the answer to, since there is significant evidence suggesting that the answer is yes, which rather undercuts your argument. Rural Belize is one place (Waynforth, 1998) and you apparently get more sex at college if you are more symmetrical (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1994).Maybe you should do some research for yourself before you start telling us all how it is and what evolution says. You would be less likely to be completely wrong all the time and look less like you just make stuff up and lie.TTFN,WK

If you are going to claim to have any logical precision, you are going to have to be a lot more tidy with your understanding of very simple clauses. My comment was a response to 1.61803, who stated that it made sense logically according to the inferred understanding of evolution, that of course people who are more symmetrical would be more healthy and thus be preferred mate choices. That was a pretty simple part of this whole discussion, so if you are going to get confused already at this, and say that I was saying the paper was making that claim-when I was responding to 1.61803's claim-then you obviously are going to have difficulty following along with some of the more complicated ideas. Ideas which are necessary to be able to follow if you have any hope of understanding life's complex questions. You are not giving me confidence when you confuse me saying the paper said this with me saying that 1.61803 is suggesting this.Secondly! I am glad we have a least gotten somewhere with trying to actually answer a question. So regarding this so called evidence, let me just ask-is this the evidence you wish to go with that is suggesting that that FA really is equal to a man's ability to reproduce? because I am glad if this is the evidence you wish to provide to support that notion, but first i want to make sure you aren't going to change the goalposts or back out of saying this is good evidence to support that idea. After I have your assurance that you won't suddenly change directions-I will be happy to tear that study apart as just as much bunk science as so called "science" of the original study. Because that study you just referenced from Belize is even weaker than the topic study (a study in which the author has conveniently glossed over all evidence which completely contradicts his predicted results, and yet trumps up all the evidence which he claims does support his pre-determined conclusion. An all too common trick in these studies.)Worse still, the second study you referenced is just repeating the same points as the topic study, without showing the all important WHY evolution would cause one to choose symmetrical over non-symmetrical-and what is the result for populations. Its as if you completely missed the entire point. I asked-well then is natural selection weeding out asymmetrical individuals-so that they are becoming less and less of a part of the population. Is natural selection working? Are we as a population becoming more symmetrical? For this you seem to be suddenly at a loss for words to reply.And frankly, I am not at all impressed by your constant ability to just drone like a mechanical parrot, your same tired lines about-why don't you study more so you won't always be wrong. It doesn't make you points any stronger, and just highlights the fact that you like to try to throw divergences from the subject, as if you can not argue the points so you are only capable of throwing out your nonsense hand waving insults which have no meaning at all-and worse still aren't even creative or funny. The only thing worse than saying nothing meaningful is saying nothing meaningful while being stupendously boring at the same time. Edited by Bolder-dash, : No reason given.Edited by Bolder-dash, : No reason given.

Does this mean that we might eventually see you actually return to the original paper and the statistical analysis you were going to give us as to why its results were weak?As far as I can tell you are the one who has done their best to go off topic repeatedly, right from the OP when you managed to completely misrepresent almost every aspect of the paper that you claimed to be criticising. Seriously? I can hardly keep track of the number of times in this thread that you have stated things that the paper claimed according to you which were not in the paper. But fine, you were misrepresenting 1.61803's position rather than the original paper's, it gets hard to keep track sometimes.So basically you agree that you have stopped discussing the paper? As I said, which of us is it that is taking things off topic? Could you rephrase that so that it isn't a complete misrepresentation of both what the papers I presented say and what current evolutionary-developmental theory suggests? Once again you are constructing a strawman from your own fevered imaginings. You mean you'll bitch about it, misrepresent it and make lots of completely unsupported assertions about it? I find that all too easy to believe but I'm not sure why you think we would want you to do that with yet another paper when we are having such a hard time getting you to actually meaningfully discuss the first one. All this suggests to me is that once again you aren't bothering to actually read the papers, or if you are you aren't understanding them. The commonly understood reason was in the introductions to both of those papers, that fluctuating asymmetry is a reflection of the developmental stability of an individuals genotype.Therefore FA is a proxy measure for more developmentally robust, and typically fitter, genotypes. If low FA is indeed an honest signal of higher fitness then it is reasonable that prospective mates will favour individuals with lower FA. Both introductions are also full of references to the empirical studies that support this hypothesis. At last something we can agree on.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

In which worldview is it reasonable? In yours of accidents that get passed on genetically,and indeterminate successes?It is only reasonable if you can somehow coherently demonstrate how evolution would construct such a paradigm. In order for your theory to make sense, there would have to be some individuals of a population who didn't choose mates with more symmetrical features and some individuals who did. The ones who choose the more symmetrical mates were more successful at reproducing because for some reason their mates were not capable enough, and thus it became an acquired characteristic of the population that individuals select those with more symmetry. Then you have to show how does this trait for selecting symmetrical individuals get hardwired into our genes and passed on to the next generation so that they know they should choose the symmetrical individuals.Its all well and good to say that its logical as a survival technique if it truly is-but you also have to show how EVOLUTION made it so. We need two components-first it has to actually BE true that the mates who choose symmetrical ones were more successful, and two, that the preference for choosing symmetrical individual is something that can be inherited through our genes. Do you think we will find a gene for selection of symmetry?I find it amusing that when people are discussing the acquiring of personalities, they forget that it all must make sense from a mutation, and passed on to offspring, genetic phenotype kind of world. Things can make sense in this world if we are only looking at it from a structured world point of view, but it is another thing to try and explain things from a simple accidentally acquired trait that is successfully passed on kind of world. All of these studies attempt to combine what they think would be useful, with what is possible according to evolution, without making the logical connections. Edited by Bolder-dash, : to satisfy huh

HUH?

BTW, WK, are you ever going to answer whether or not natural selection is working. Are the asymmetricals of the world slowly dying off because they are being selected against?Are there less asymmetrical people now than in the past do you think? Are the symmetricals winning?That's the whole point of natural selection isn't it?

Natural Selection has no point.

This is demonstrably the case in almost any population where such questions are relevant, i.e. sexual populations with non-random mate choice based on visual cues. Does every female only mate with the most symmetrical male in the planet? Obviously not. There is a continuous spectrum of fluctuating asymmetry and almost certainly a similarly discontinuous spectrum of traits allowing both the discernment of such and a preference for mating with such individuals. That makes no sense, it is in fact the complete opposite of what we have been discussing. Well almost, assuming that there is a spectrum of preferences in the population those who have a preference for low FA will be mating preferentially with higher fitness individuals than those with a preference for high FA, assuming that low FA is an honest signal of developmental stability. That means that natural selection will be tending to favour a preference for low FA. That isn't an acquired characteristic in the sense it is usually understood though. Quite possibly not, it is probably a complex polygenic trait, there might well be an element of cultural inheritance in mate choice as well. What we may well find is that such preferences are heritable to a degree however. There is considerable evidence for the heritability of some mating preferences in other species so there is no reason why choosing low FA shouldn't be one. No they don't, it is as simple as that. You have just chosen to ignore all the years of background work that provide most of these logical connections, which is why this thread has degenerated into a series of rabbit holes with you questioning every paper I cite and asking how each one knew about some aspect of the hypothesis, which leads us to a further back paper where we start all over again.Why not actually go back to the original paper and make a coherent crtique of it, such as the statistical reasoning which you claimed was so flawed but didn't see fit to actually explain how it was flawed.TTFN,WK

I have already raised a number of objections to the methods of this study, but for some reason you either can't or refuse to see the objections.The first is, does not the margins for error of calculating the FA essentially make the two groups exactly equal?Secondly, what is the game they are playing actually testing? Is it really testing people's level of co-operation? I don't think so, it is a game of strategy, and of risk taking. You take a slighter greater risk of getting low point totals by choosing the defect option, at the possibility of getting the greater pay off of getting a much higher pay-off if your gambit is correct. Choosing the "co-operate" option is simply a safer option of suffering point losses, but rules you out of getting a high point total. No one should be fooled into thinking that just because you have labeled the high risk-high reward option "defect' and the low risk-low reward option "co-operate" that you are in fact testing people's co-operation levels in society. That's ridiculous. More likely you are testing people's greed tolerance.Furthermore, the study is attempting to draw conclusions, based on a preconceived idea-and so all methods are inherently designed to prove their notions. The smarter option may well be the "defect" choice. Doesn't that mean that they are testing who is smarter, and not who co-operates more? They also wanted to find a positive correlation between testosterone and which choice you made, but since it happened to turn out that the ones who chose to defect fell someone in the middle range of testosterone levels, then guess what, this means that people who have middle testosterone are best at co-operating. They are determined to conclude that this is indeed a factor in the subjects choices, so one way or another a conclusion must be drawn. Its every bit as likely that it is no factor at all, but if you take a small enough study, and you are determined to find something that looks like a trend, then you are going to do so.If this study turned out the other way, and it found that their was a slight bias towards FA and NOT co-operating (since their margins of error allow for either result actually) would they not try to draw the conclusion that people with high FA are socially less well adjusted, because of their evolutionary disadvantages or some other some such silly assumption.Because after all, this is what all of these types of studies are all about. Their objective is to find an evolutionary correlation between ones behavior, and how evolution has shaped that behavior. It is virtually impossible that such a study will come up completely empty handed. If it shows a correlation one way, then a story will be made up to show how evolution made it so. If it turns out the other way, again a story will be made up to show how evolution favored that way. "High levels of testosterone are the best for co-operating..., no no, low levels of testosterone are the best for co-operating because... wait...mid levels of testosterone are the best for co-operating because.."When they spend so much time doing these kinds of studies, is anyone actually going to believe that there is an incentive for them to simply say..."Well, it was a waste of time, we couldn't find any pattern", and then just throw the results into a dumpster? When does that happen, where is the great bin of studies that show absolutely no correlations to anything? Where can I found all these mountains of studies that took years to do, and then ended up with "We have have no ******* -->******* clue."Is that what really happens in science academia? Is anyone so naive as to believe that? Edited by Bolder-dash, : No reason given.

I have a much better study for them to conduct. Have them secretly measure the symmetry of all the contestants of the next Survivor show. Then let them predict beforehand exactly who is going to get voted off the show each week, based on these measurements.If they can do this with 90 percent accuracy then I will start to believe them.

Because previously you haven't coherently articulated them. Previously you simply stated that their results made it 'statistically impossible to draw conclusions' which is an incredibly strong statement and one that should really be supported by more than some overlapping standard deviations. No it doesn't, although it does make them overlapping in terms of standard deviation. If you graph these out then the standard deviation's do overlap considerably, but the more important measure would be the standard error. Standard error is calculated as ... ... where SE is the standard error, sd the standard deviation and n the number of subjects in the study. So the SE for the FA would be ...Defect Cooperate Which I'm sure you appreciate is considerably smaller and which produces no overlap.If you think there is a flaw with their calculations giving them a p-value of 0.015 for the differences between the 'defecting' and 'cooperating' populations then what do you think it is? The fact that you don't think such overlapping populations should be significantly different statistically doesn't really count for much. A p-value of 0.05 is a commonly used cut off for statistical significance, it means that there would only be a 1 in 20 chance that the results would be as they were from the study despite there not being any real difference in FA between the populations. Given the actual p-value the chances for the results being due to chance in this case are much lower, around 1 in 66.Ideally we would have access to the raw data for the study so we could perform our own analyses and confirm the statistical significance of the relationship. In the absence of the raw data I'm not sure what your basis is for claiming that the statistical significance they calculate doesn't exist? Do you think they are trying to be fraudulent or that they simply used an unsuitable statistical test? The t-test seems to be appropriate to me for comparisons between two populations as in the study. I don't see how this is true, the study is designed to test the hypothesis, in fact it looks at several distinct hypotheses. That is what the results showed, if you have an actual critique of their statistics that casts doubt on their significance values then present it, otherwise you are just giving us your opinion and expecting us to give it the same weight as statistical analysis. The entire point of statistical analysis is to test this contention. I would also question whether this is 'a small enough study' there are frequently studies with truly dubious levels of n, i.e. less than 10 or 20. One thing to bear in mind is that the necessary sample size is really dependent on the strength of the effect being studied. If the effect is strong enough it will be detectable even in a smaller study.As to the last bit, that seems more like what you were advocating before, looking at hundreds of different variables. Going back to our p-values, it is easy to see that we might expect to see as many as 4 independent variables form a set of 100 giving us results which appear statistically significant at the p<0.05 level even if there was really no difference between the 2 populations. That is why looking at specific hypothesis driven variables is preferable to the sort of fishing expedition you were advocating. Well that is another issue and one that has long been thought to plague evolutionary psychology. Sadly you can't due to what is known as publication bias the data exists in tucked away lab books and long forgotten folders on hard drives in labs all over the planet. It absolutely does. There is a lot of research, especially negative research, that never gets published. Yes, people who know anything about science publishing.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

I would disagree with you that this study is large enough to consider the small differences they noted as being that significant; but actually I was not referring to the p value when I said the two groups were statistically almost identical, I was referring to the calculations for FA. it seems to me the two groups could well overlap with those margins for error.Irregardless, you once again failed to acknowledge my more significant point, that is, what were they actually testing. Is playing a game where you have to choose which is the best way to make points really a test of co-operation? You seem to have completely skipped this fact. Couldn't they just as easily have called it selecting blue or selecting red, instead of selecting 'defect' or "co-operate." This is what truly makes it bunk science. the test in no way whatsoever was a measure of how one would cooperate in a society. They were going to be making money based on how many points they got. It is a casino game. It says nothing in the slightest about how these individuals cooperate in society. That is a fictitious scenario created only in the minds of the authors.If the test tests anything, it tests your card game skills. Maybe what the study proved is that people with medium levels of testosterone are best at playing card games.Since you ignored this point, can you at least now answer, is natural selection working, are the asymmetrical of the world slowly being reduced in the world's populations? Are we seeing less and less of them as the ages go by, because of natural selection? Is the world becoming more symmetrical?

And by the way, I thought scientists had the utmost integrity, so why would there be a bias towards only publishing studies that support their assertions? Naughty naughty.I want to read those 20 other studies they did that showed no correlation whatsoever between FA and parlor games.