You Keep Objecting I'll Keep Making My Points - Hate Mail

Dawkins success in introducing an obvious lie as well as an absurd and self-contradicting fable into the popular understanding of science and almost as certainly into science education is an excellent example of why natural selection is such a really shitty theory.  Take this part of his claim gone over yesterday:

. . . There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk . . . 

A.  There is no such evidence, that evidence would have to be in the form of a sufficient number of filmed examples of the behavior of flocks of birds in relation to flying predators to objectively show their relation to each other to support the claim.  You would have to have the film to analyze and review (though behavioral science pretty much does without review, as recent scandals prove). 

1. First, they would have to show the predator, in flight, to show, clearly its perception of the flock containing a bird it would kill and eat at the time it heard the "first call".  [ Editing this after I posted it, it occurs to me that since the stimulus that led to the proposed event is sound, it would have to be a sound recording that would identify when the "first call" was made and when the "flying predator" heard it.  If you really wanted to be scientific about it.  I doubt that there is much behavioral science that takes something like that into account.  I am certain that such evidence in the lost, unrecorded past is not available to support just-so stories told about the lost past.]

2. It would have to show the flock from which that bird was taken so as to see which bird was "the first to call out".  

3.  It would have to show that the "first bird to call out" was the one killed. Or not 

4.  Since Dawkins claims that the risk he invents is "only a slight additional risk," his claim would anticipate that there would be many such filmed examples that the "first bird to call out" was not the one caught, which you would also have to be able to determine. 

5.  To support his claim of a "slight additional risk" you would have to be able to generate data to support any such "first birds to call out" were at a statistically significant greater risk of being the one killed.  I don't know how many such examples it would take to make the mathematics support Dawkins' claim but I am certain that 

a. no such filmed examples exist, certainly none that show the relation of the predator and the flock (not to mention other birds or animals in the predators range of perception who may be a possible alternative meal), certainly not at the resolutions required, 

b. there are certainly not enough to come up with numbers that could achieve statistical significance showing what he claims. 

B. There are no such items of "indirect evidence" that could dispose of alternative explanations than "genetic altruism" such as the one I posed yesterday, that any "first calling out" which would certainly be heard by birds (and other animals) closer than the "flying predator" would cause a chaotic situation even before the predator heard the "first call" which would prevent the predator from even determining which bird was "the first to call out".   Some of which don't contain the disqualifying mathematical incompetence that I started my list with.  Some of which don't, as Dawkins' does, contradict the very thing he invented it to support, neo-Darwinian natural selection. 

The fable is so incompetently and dishonestly posed that I'm sure there are many other problems with it,  yet, in the habits that we got from Darwinism and its myriad of "just-so stories" that we believe this kind of crap is reliable science and act on it.  The just-so stories of evo-psy and its allied fields are the stuff that you'll hear support proposed laws and social policy promoted as reliably supported by science on NPR and Fresh Air and online.  I have repeatedly pointed out that it had successfully revived the kind of pre-war antisemitic racial science within accredited, reputable American universities and as promoted by Dawkins' in The God Delusion - to talk about academic antisemitism such as I also mentioned yesterday.   That asshole law hack and Republican impeachment witness, Jonathan Turley, is a big proponent of something that strikes me as similar,  "neuro-law" which is generated with a similar line of bullshit behavioral science related to it. 

John Horgan, at Scientific American, in a piece I linked to recently talked about the "decadence of science"* as personified in the scientific patronage of Jeffrey Epstein.  He talked about both the decadence of  decades long regimes of scientific culture which not only are totally unsupported with observational evidence but for which there is no hope of getting supporting evidence for.   I believe he concentrated mostly on current theoretical physics, though he certainly went into the scandals of fraud in the behavioral and life sciences.  But that stuff, science divorced from observation or the possibility of observation is as true of any claim for natural selection as it is for string theory or multiverse theory.  And it certainly always will be in any claims made about it in the past and for many of the reasons I give above for Dawkin's just-so story. 

*  I don't remember if I pointed out to Horgan that Bertrand Russell's gloomy response to Eddington's description of recent physics of a hundred hears ago predicted such decadence, though not in the terms I've put it in.  I may have, I post comments there from time to time.  Eddington wasn't gloomy because he wasn't a materialist, but materialism has been an intellectually unsupportable ideology for more than a hundred years, now.  Science is still in its clutches.  Even more so academia. 

Update:  Not related but when Simels says "I'm not making this up,"  yeah, he is.  He's an example of a yet named pathology that is like corprolalia, only with lies instead of dirty words.