I love science. I love the search for understanding, the quest for comprehending the secrets of the universe.
But there’s science and then there’s The Science.
The Science isn’t science, but activism masquerading as science. I’d love to tell you that the two were distinct and separate, so it was easy to tell the difference, but The Science has largely coopted science as a whole.
And from time to time, something happens that helps the walls crumble down a little.
I came across a story yesterday about just that.
You may have heard that the secret to living a very long life could be found in a few different areas, one of which was in Japan but also included parts of Greece, Italy, and even California.
This was the result of research that found much higher rates of people over the age of 100 living in these so-called blue zones.
The problem?
Those very old people? Yeah, they’re dead.
Buettner identified five parts of the world where people were living such natural and healthy lives, and ringed them on a map with a blue pen, hence the name “Blue Zones,” which stuck. The main blue zones are in Sardinia (Italy), Okinawa Prefecture (Japan), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Icaria (Greece), and Loma Linda (California). Some of the people he discovered in these zones were well over 100 years old, and some of the official records in these zones indicated that people were even living to 150 years of age.
If that sounds too hard to achieve, you can try being poor and unhealthy instead (?)
150? Well... it turns out that things weren’t as simple as Buettner thought. So much so that Dr. Saul Justin Newman of the Centre of Longitudinal Studies has just won the first-ever Ig Nobel prize in Demography for his work debunking Blue Zones.
Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded since 1991, to people who have conducted research that “makes people laugh, and then think.” Newman’s findings were certainly thought-provoking. Contrary to the conclusions drawn by Buettner, he found that residents of the Blue Zones were actually experiencing:
· Shorter life expectancy
· Worse health
· Higher poverty and low per-capita incomes
· Higher crime rates
They were also more likely to live in remote areas where there was an “absence of vital registration.”
The new Birther scandal
Newman compiled his findings in a study which catalogued “widespread fraud and error” in all parts of the world where, it was alleged, people were living to well beyond 100 years of age. In the United States, for instance, he found that not a single supercentenarian’s age could be proven with valid documentation.
Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error.
He also noted that once birth certificates were introduced into a country, the number of people registered as supercentenarians dropped by between 69 and 82 percent.
It also seems when it’s not a case of poor record-keeping, there’s something far worse going on. The story notes that a lot of those supposed 150-year-old people were really folks who died decades earlier, but their families pretended they were still alive so they could pocket the deceased’s benefits.
It seems that these areas were also areas with high poverty and high crime, which doesn’t tend to go with long lives. It does go with pretending someone is still alive to collect government benefits for as long as one can get away with it, though.
And this was pushed onto the American people as if there were secrets to longevity we should all heed.
One of those was a plant-based diet, which the climate alarmists—another group that is part of The Science—have been pushing for ages now.
The other aspects weren’t necessarily—they included light exercise, alcohol in moderation, a family-focused life, and a “life centered around religious traditions and rituals—but those also weren’t objectionable necessarily to The Science.
So what happened?
Well, if it wasn’t intentional fraud meant to advance the plant-based diet narrative from a non-climate change directive, it was laziness. Apparently, the original researcher just pulled records and built his entire research based on that. He didn’t actually have anyone go and lay eyes on these super old people and he didn’t notice that on Sardinia—the blue zone in Italy and an island—all the super old people are concentrated in one or two small districts, but they’re not scattered throughout the rest of the island.
This is a concentrated area that shares diet, weather, and culture. It should be all over, but the researchers never blinked.
Either he didn’t want to seek out the truth or he just didn’t bother to do it.
Now, I’m chalking this up to The Science, but it’s entirely possible that this was really just a researcher doing a half-assed job, then the media running with it because frankly, who wouldn’t want to live to be at least 150?
I’m 51 right now, and I’d love to have another century in front of me. I’m terrified of dying and the idea that I’ve only got two or three decades scares the crap out of me. The idea of living another 100 years would be incredibly comforting.
So it’s not hard to see someone with a similar mindset getting a press release and not even considering the viability of the research.
It wouldn’t be the first time it happened, either.
Whether it was The Science or just a more garden variety of bad science, the truth is that the quest for truth isn’t really happening these days. It’s making it much harder to accept what scientists are telling us because so many of their colleagues have lied to us.
The walls are crumbling down to some degree or another, though not as quickly as they shoot. Sooner or later, though, the process is likely to speed up and the collapse finish up in the blink of an eye.
The question is how many legitimate researchers are going to be crushed when they do and how many of the others will survive.
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In the 1970s a researcher claimed that the Caucus had 5,000 centenarians with 1,800 living in Soviet Georgia. That led to Dannon producing an ad suggesting that eating Yoplait Yogurt was what gave allowed these people to live to their advanced age. This was later shown to be an example of Soviet exaggeration. A more recent study shows that Georgia (the country) has fewer than 500 centenarians. The states of Minnesota and Louisiana have comparable populations and 1,044 centenarians and 804 centenarians, respectively, in the 2000 census.
How many legitimate researchers will get crushed when the consequences come a-calling is a fair question. What I'd like to know is if there are any legitimate researchers left?
The funding for research has become so politicized, unless a researcher is pushing The Message, I'd bet he's already left research.