Black Science Man Misstating Genetic Differences Between Human and Apes
Black Science Man Misstating Genetic Differences Between Human and Apes
Neil d. Tyson is a very modern 'Popularizer' of Science: he's post-factual
I recently fact-checked Black Science Man Neil d. Tyson. Tyson is the elite system’s designated science man, a ‘popularizer’ if you will, fulfilling the role formerly held by Carl Sagan in decades past.
Tyson is a basic agnostic/atheist, and he mouths pretty predictable and frankly rather boring observations about science and religion.
He has the same plain observations about space, insights that, frankly, aren’t all that interesting.
Here are some of the common memes he amplifies:
Space is big!
Black holes are crazy!
Where are those aliens at?
Robots!
I can’t find God in my telescope.
Musings on time.
Let me give you a few of Tyson’s big amazing insights:
In the 90s there were a few mocking satirical accounts that offered profound insights that were really just idiotic and moronic observations on the level of a Yogi Berra quote. Tyson’s quotes feel a lot like SNL’s “Jack Handey” or the Demotivational Poster Line.
Tyson claims to be an Astrophysicist even though he flunked the PhD program at the University of Texas and was, somehow, able to get accepted by the Communists at Columbia who eventually awarded him a degree.
His contributions to his field have been embarrassingly few. His scholarship is light. But he’s useful because he’s a Black Science Man. He called himself a ‘popularizer’ of science.
So he’s content to have the role of ‘popularizer’ of science. He’s kind of the chief cheerleader of the harder sciences, even though his pedigree and claims to the field are tenuous.
Personally I’ve always loved space and astronomy, so I’m glad our failing society still has a designated role like this for someone to fill. Television, the ADD Internet, and the death of the printed word, have been horrible developments for society.
Here’s a YouTube short, an old Richard Nixon interview, that quickly captures that basic idea; it conveys this idea that a society governed primarily by the printed word was simply more serious:
So, if Tyson is catering to the ADD segment of America to make them feel as though science is impactful and purposeful, fine.
My only problem, then, with Tyson is that whenever he talks, he’s often wrong.
He often speaks about complex subjects that he has no known expertise in.
And he’s so insufferably arrogant that he never corrects himself even after it’s clear that he’s wrong.
Tyson was caught by the Federalist’s Sean Davis in 2014 fabricating a quote from George W. Bush while President, who, Tyson claimed, made some post-9/11 statement that made it seem like the conflict was between Christians and Muslims.
Anyone who had a pulse during that time knows the opposite is true: Bush went out of his way to make clear he was only bombing terrorists and their families, kids, and wedding parties. He wasn’t targeting them because they were Muslim, how dare anyone think such a thing!
Getting a quote wrong is understandable, but the way in which Tyson doubled down on the false Bush quote revealed a lot of pride and vanity.
Tyson was also opining about biology and gender politics last year, and came up with what he thinks is a great insight about solving the trannies-grooming-in-bathrooms problem by simply having unisex bathrooms for everyone, as if that’s some great insight. And while that might seem logical to a literalist, it ignores the political hidden agenda of the trans crowd to 1) force acceptance of their goals, 2) organize using what they feel is an emotional issue that bifurcates society into us-and-thems, and 3) keep winning on this issue, forcing their political coalition to keep catering to their wants and desires.
In short, there’s no compromise possible with a political faction intent on dominance which feels no consequences for its actions.
But it all shows that Tyson isn’t really serious about his role arbitrating science disputes in society. The courageous thing to do would be to lay bare the scientific reality about biology and gender, but that would come at a clout consequence, so he takes what he thinks is a safe position.
So anyway, this is all the backdrop to Neil Tyson’s statements about a difference aspect of biology: the degree to which humans and apes are related by percentage of DNA.
Hopefully you will not be surprised to learn that, here again, Tyson is a moron who is simply regurgitating left-wing fakenews memes that are a generation out of date.
Here’s the video:
Here’s the written transcript:
Interviewer: Is it possible that humans are the most intelligent species in the Universe?
Tyson: If there is no other life in the Universe, then we are the most intelligent species that has ever existed in the Universe. However, who defines humans as being intelligent?
Interviewer: Humans!
Tyson: Humans! What’s our DNA difference from chimps? A 1% difference. If there’s only 1% that separates us maybe there’s only really a 1% intelligence difference as well. Let’s go out into the universe and find some another creature that’s 1% smarter than us.
In the same way that we’re 1% smarter than chimps. Roll Stephen Hawking out, there he is. They would say of Stephen Hawking, this one is slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little Timmy over here in preschool, and we go out, and oh you just arrived at the principles of Calculus, oh put it on the refrigerator door!
Interviewer: If they are so intelligent, why do they still have refrigerators?
OK, so there’s a lot wrong here. Like, a lot.
This was a fine opportunity to highlight, or popularize, science’s attempt to answer the question of whether life exists elsewhere or not. It is known as “Drake’s Equation” and it is a constantly revised algorithm that attempts to use the known parameters on the requirements for life to develop, to estimate how many civilizations are out there.
The original estimates in 1959 put somewhere between 100 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way.
By the 70s, the estimates had gone to thousands to millions.
By the 80s, the estimates had gone down to 1,000 to 100,000.
By the 90s, the estimates had gone down to 100’s to 1,000.
By the 2000’s, the estimates had gone down to a few dozen to thousands.
By the 2010’s, the estimates had gone down to 1 to 10.
The current view is that there is, at most, 1-100 other civilizations out there that we could possibly communicate with.
It’s uh… kind of bleak if you were a Star Trek fan.
There’s probably no one else out there, friends.
There was a moment recently where some claimed the Drake Equation essentially showed that life, anywhere in the universe, was statistically impossible. Meaning that, life on this planet, is nothing short of a miracle by scientific standards.
There’s been a lot of backtracking since that development, because science doesn’t want to inadvertently prove that life is impossible. That has… some interesting conclusions to draw. If you apply the Sherlock Holmes quip of “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” - if life is otherwise naturally impossible, then something supernatural must have happened to cause it.
But of course not only have we not found intelligent life elsewhere, we haven’t found any life anywhere else.
Earth is home to 8.7 million species. The high estimate is 1 trillion.
The number of ‘total animal population’ on Earth is a stunning 20 quintillion. That’s 20 billion billion living things on the planet.
Elsewhere: we have found zero. We have found evidence or suggested, inferred evidence of, precisely zero anywhere else.
We haven’t even found fossils of bacteria.
The three most likely places for life in our solar system are places where we’re hoping to find bacteria and, maybe, a fish on Europa.
But if the Drake Equation suggests there are few very living planets at all, and very few civilizations, then yes, we are very likely to be the most advanced and intelligent beings in the universe.
There’s this weird neoliberal thing where they feel compelled to use astronomy to make people feel small and insignificant. This is an oddly recurring theme for the left: they want to use space to make you feel a little bit of nihilism I suppose. Frankly I think the way that the left-wing mind virus spreads is by denigrating, demoralizing, and humiliating strong and proud people into being weak and small. Space is useful for that limited purpose.
They want you to feel like a tiny speck in this huge universe.
And then they get angry when you correctly point out that it’s an endless expanse of pointlessness. It’s the biggest empty parking lot possible: nobody’s home.
They keep telling you things are big as a way to make you feel small. The Sahara Desert is very big as well, I don’t need to be constantly reminded how tiny I am in comparison to it.
So, there’s very likely few, if any, other civilizations out there. Few of them are likely to be more intelligent than Earth.
The next issue Tyson presents is whether ‘intelligence’ is simply defined by humans or whether we can consider it objective.
What he’s doing here is using two different definitions of ‘intelligent’ - and it’s hard to understand whether he’s doing this on purpose or whether, frankly, he’s just that low intelligence.
“Intelligent Life” can have two meanings: it can mean either that a specific person or thing is very intelligent and has a high capacity. It can also mean whether some thing has the capacity for rational or intelligent thought, the power to feel and to will, having the capacity for knowledge, understanding, and thought.
A computer can be called intelligent in the sense that it has a high capacity, but it is not intelligent in the sense that it has the capacity to learn. Artificial Intelligence can appear to have the ability to learn, but, so far, it has largely been merely mimicking that ability through the repetition and ability to perform rote tasks. Defining just how ‘intelligent’ AI is, has become a bit of a cottage industry.
But there’s no serious argument that humans would not be considered ‘intelligent’ in the sense of being sentient. Pigs, chickens, fish are considered sentient. If a bird and a dog is sentient, does it matter whether a specific dog can elucidate its ability to understand and reason?
Of course not. We can reason with it and observe the behaviors. It’s a falsifiable premise.
Now, you might say, “well that’s all fine and good, but it’s still originally defined by humans” but not only is that a silly argument, but it’s also untrue. It’s the same way that saying language is man-made, and therefore perhaps it’s subjectively only true for humans.
Language and science are observable, repeatable, relationships. Math is not species-subjective. If every human died, and in a thousand years a visiting alien found our math books, our language books, and our science books, they could be understood. The understanding is not reliant on humans doing the interpreting and explaining.
Either Tyson is the worst scientist on the planet, or he’s being so sloppy with words that he might as well be. I’m not sure which answer is more troubling.
Tyson then segues into DNA differences.
He then majorly misstates the “DNA difference” between humans and chimps.
Here’s what Tyson says: What’s our DNA difference from chimps? A 1% difference.
The human DNA difference from chimps is, in reality, somewhere between 4-5%.
The previous research on this was a bit sloppy. These two posts on Reddit clarify why the previous meme of 1% was false:
Human beings have genetic variation among humans somewhere in the range of 0.5%-1.0%.
So Tyson is simply misstating the relevant statistics here as well.
But the huge whopper of a statement is this one in Tyson’s comments: “maybe there’s only really a 1% intelligence difference as well.”
This is honestly just idiotic. It should be considered the stupidest thing this man has ever said.
We share 60% of our DNA with a Banana.
Are we twice as ‘intelligent’ as a banana?
Is a banana half as ‘intelligent’ as a human?
Conflating DNA similarity with sentience is wrong enough, but conflating it with pure intelligence is equally as wrong.
There are entire fields of study that separately study these items. No reasonable person or scientist would blithely conflate the two.
Again, Tyson is not a serious person.
This is yet another moment where you know that Neil Tyson is not only not a scientist, but he’s just fundamentally flawed in his presentation of scientific issues. If he’s meant to popularize science, what does that say about our society that its biggest cheerleaders are so moronic?
But let’s take the actual core of what Tyson said and dissect that and deal with that as well:
Tyson: Humans! What’s our DNA difference from chimps? A 1% difference. If there’s only 1% that separates us maybe there’s only really a 1% intelligence difference as well. Let’s go out into the universe and find some another creature that’s 1% smarter than us.
In the same way that we’re 1% smarter than chimps. Roll Stephen Hawking out, there he is. They would say of Stephen Hawking, this one is slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little Timmy over here in preschool, and we go out, and oh you just arrived at the principles of Calculus, oh put it on the refrigerator door!
One major issue here is that Tyson is conflating a 1% DNA difference with being the same as a 1% ‘intelligence’ difference. That issue will come up later, but let’s just try to use them inappropriately interchangeably to keep the word count reasonable here, because Tyson inadvertently provides us an interesting challenge.
And while there is certainly a genetic component to intelligence, a very strong one, it varies widely within humanity, within the same race, even often within the same family. There is likely some sort of DNA expression for intelligence, some bit of genetic coding that expresses in some and not so much in others, but science has not found that yet. And the amount of DNA that might vary, constituting very wide intelligence differences, might be very small or otherwise imperceptible.
It’s certainly true that no single gene controls intelligence, it’s influenced by a wide variety of genes that each contribute a bit to the overall final intellect of the individual.
Society measures intelligence, even though we often feel bad about the results. They are found in the realm of the ‘intelligence quotient’ or “IQ” tests. There are two primary tests used, the most commonly used is the Weschler series, though the Stanford-Binet model has been around longer.
There’s a lot of discourse about how these tests don’t track all the proper things, and don’t properly capture aptitude, etc. - many of those complaints are valid. And there’s also the issue where, because the scores are captured in a bell curve and are relational to all the other test-takers, having a much higher score does not indicate the degree or percentage to which someone is more intelligent than someone else.
IQ tests don’t allow us to neatly say much other than to reflect how someone’s score places them in the overall pool of other human beings. When the average is 100, a score of 130 lets us say how above average they are, just as a score of 70 would help us say how far below the average that person is.
IQ tests give us a chance to play out the possibilities of what Tyson so quickly suggests: finding a being that is ‘1% smarter’ than us.
On the IQ tests, the average human scores 100. The scores are constantly adjusted and weighted to produce that result. Most people will score between 85-115, and it averages out to 100. Because this is a social population, it presents as a bell curve distribution.
This is what’s called a “normal distribution” for a social population below:
But if the average is 100, then of course the simplest thing to do is to look for someone who is “1% more intelligent” than us.
It is almost too easy to say “101!” and be done with Tyson’s challenge with some sloppy math. For those of you who don’t know, there would be zero detectable difference between a 100 and a 101 IQ-scored person from a simple cognitive basis.
As I mentioned before, it’s a little messy to simply say that the IQ scores capture a logarithmic scale of intelligence objectively. That’s not really the case. It’s just capturing the whole human population and dividing them up so you can easily tell where someone’s score ranks vis-a-vis other human beings.
That being said, if an alien species was 101 average IQ, they would present as intelligent as we are, they would seem no different in terms of their cognitive abilities.
These things are extremely controversial to say the least, but the racial differences in intelligence is such that the average Caucasian scores 100, and the average East Asian scores 106.
People get all sorts of crazy angry about these facts, so I’ll use them only sparingly here to make a quick point: if you were an average white person, and if you had ever met someone who is East Asian (China, Japan, Koreas, Taiwan), then you’ve met someone who is likely to be, on average, more than 1% more intelligent than you are, using these tests as a way to broadly capture ‘intelligence’.
The average undergraduate student has an IQ score of 102.
The average attorney has an IQ between 115-130. So if you have an above average IQ of 110 and you have met an attorney, you have met someone who is, on average, 5-20% more intelligent than you are compared to other humans.
Being 1% more intelligent than someone is not going to relegate the complexities of Calculus to their school-aged young children. An alien species that is 1% more intelligent than the population at large will be relatively indistinguishable.
This gets to the heart of the stupidity of what Tyson is saying: that if a being were merely a little bit smarter than the average one of us, that they would be enormously more intelligent. There’s more than a 1% variance among human intelligence already, as anyone who spends time at a Food Court in a shopping mall knows.
But let’s say you want someone who is 1% different in DNA, and you want to know how different they are, in terms of intelligence. Perhaps that’s what Tyson meant, even if it’s not what he actually said.
Well, Tyson claims that chimps are just 1% different from humans in terms of DNA. He’s wrong about that, but let’s grant him that for the moment.
Chimps have been given IQ scores. Their average score is 25. That’s five deviations from the norm.
The average chimp has the same low IQ score as 0.00006% of the human population. In a US population of 330 million, that means the average chimp is as smart or smarter than the most mentally retarded 19,800 Americans.
The same number of people have an IQ score of 170 or better, again according to the standard distribution.
Also for what it’s worth, trashy online sources with very little credibility, claim Stephen Hawking had an IQ score of around 160.
But the difference between a normal person and a chimp, is the same difference between a normal person, and a genius with a 170 IQ.
So to Tyson’s point: if he’s looking for an alien being that’s 1% smarter than the average human, assuming the 1% DNA difference between chimps and humans is connected to intelligence and reflects at the same rate, then the intelligence difference between the average human and a chimp is the same difference between an average human and a genius with a 170 IQ.
Tyson’s assumptions here are all flawed of course, but that basic algebra with his statement is consistent: chimp to man, is the same as man to chess genius.
We have found the genius aliens among us, and it is us.
When I was a child, my IQ was tested. IQ tests to children and to adults are not the same, the test is adjusted and re-administered based on age, and I haven’t taken one since I was young. And I don’t want to be a loathsome braggart, but my scores were much closer to Tyson’s alien genius than to the average human. And if certain human populations score consistently low on such tests, let’s just say those humans are much closer to chimps than I am close in scores to them.
Does that mean my DNA is better? Does that mean I am an alien to other human beings? Both questions and answers seem silly. It doesn’t mean I can breeze through calculus. And in fact, high intelligence comes with a wide variety of social ills and many high IQ folks relate that they’d prefer not to be burdened with aptitude that creates such isolation. In addition, that isolation can often cause them to be bad at certain fields such as math, because they often can’t intuitively handle the subject, neglect to do the rote learning to master the rules of math, and have very real social challenges in getting and receiving instruction.
Just because someone is ‘high IQ’ does not mean that they become a child who can easily do calculus. Intelligence and subject mastery are very different things.
The difference between chimp and human IQ scores can be smaller than the differences between humans on IQ scores.
I don’t think Tyson is prepared for the implications of such things. Which again shows, he has no idea what he’s saying, what the science actually says, and what that all means.
So if a chimp has a small DNA difference causing the intelligence deficit here, what does the genius have coded into their DNA that makes them so incredibly talented?
Does that mean that, within humans, there’s a greater than 1% difference in DNA?
It’s also just not the case that even people with that kind of brainpower can simply treat Calculus, or any difficult subject for that matter, like it’s child’s play. Professionals are careful with their words, and careful with their work. They don’t act reckless, they act purposeful. When they don’t know about a subject, they learn about it, or they admit their ignorance.
Unlike Neil Tyson, who regularly acts like a complete moron on any given topic of the day.
