Another post pondering and speculating on the Great Organizing Dynamic, and where science stands on the issue.
I realize I’m once again in way over my head, because even if I could understand all the formulas and lingos in these studies and articles, most of them I can’t obtain anyway without being part of an affiliated university or think tank or by paying hundreds of dollars each to subscribe to the various journals of officialdom.
I see I’m not alone in complaining about this fact and that many scientists agree and go for more ‘open source’ publishing options.
I see also I’m among a big crowd complaining about the lack of ethics in science publishing and research methodology. There’s plenty of evidence of the lack of replication ability, questionable research parameters favoring certain outcomes, not to mention the ridiculous mainstream garbage that makes it down the pipeline to the general public.
“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a ‘statistically significant’ result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.”
Corbett Report: The Crisis of Science
What I noticed in the short abstracts and few articles I was able to read freely, was a lot of assuming, and not enough abstract observing. Like in the following example:
First, the bees’ distance errors are similar in magnitude to their directional errors, and their angular errors decrease greatly with increasing distance to the target (decreasing more than fourfold between 100 and 700 m). As a result, the absolute scatter of recruits remains relatively constant with changing distance to the target (increasing by less than 50% between 100 and 700 m). This is to be expected if the optimal level of imprecision is the same for distance and direction and does not change with the distance of the target from the nest. Second, comparative studies involving three tropical- and one temperate-zone species (allApis)suggest that the precision of the bees’ languages may have been tuned in accordance with the spatial characteristics of the resources each species uses. We suggest that both the round dance, which conveys no directional information for nearby targets, and the high angular divergence in waggle dances indicating targets within several hundred meters of the colony are both understandable in this context.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01052234
“Distance errors,” “Directional errors,” “Imprecision”?? How would scientists have any clue at all whether the bee lines were in error when they know, admittedly, so very little about a bee colony’s social behavior?
In the following study, the parameters are so narrow and there are so many underlying assumptions it doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the layperson or even to industry, so I’m naturally curious, who funded the study and for what aims?
Honeybees have been trained to respond to very small changes in geomagnetic field intensity.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/750f/ce1b8f4723b09dd2fb1324fc916c9578c77b.pdf
What about magnetoreception? Their eyes and even their instruments can’t measure half of what’s going on in the bee brain, I’d be willing to bet the farm.
Wikipedia flat out lies that research on magnetoreception in humans is a brand new thing, as of this year, when in fact there was a groundbreaking book on the topic published in the mid-80s!
Wiki: “Humans are not thought to have a magnetic sense, but there is a protein (a cryptochrome) in the eye which could serve this function.[2] In 2019, a group of researchers have arguably provided the first concrete neuroscientific evidence that humans do have a geomagnetic sense.[3]”
Testing Human Subjects
“Our participants were all unaware of the magnetic field shifts and their brain responses. They felt that nothing had happened during the whole experiment – they’d just sat alone in dark silence for an hour. Underneath, though, their brains revealed a wide range of differences. Some brains showed almost no reaction, while other brains had alpha waves that shrank to half their normal size after a magnetic field shift.”
What might activate these sensors in humans? Here’s an interesting study Wiki seemed to miss, among others.
“The Earth’s geomagnetic field (GMF) is known to influence magnetoreceptive creatures, from bacteria to mammals as a sensory cue or a physiological modulator, despite it is largely thought that humans cannot sense the GMF. Here, we show that humans sense the GMF to orient their direction toward food in a self-rotatory chair experiment. Starved men, but not women, significantly oriented toward the ambient/modulated magnetic north or east, directions which had been previously food-associated, without any other helpful cues, including sight and sound. The orientation was reproduced under blue light but was abolished under a blindfold or a longer wavelength light (> 500 nm), indicating that blue light is necessary for magnetic orientation. Importantly, inversion of the vertical component of the GMF resulted in orientation toward the magnetic south and blood glucose levels resulting from food appeared to act as a motivator for sensing a magnetic field direction. The results demonstrate that male humans sense GMF in a blue light-dependent manner and suggest that the geomagnetic orientations are mediated by an inclination compass.
Blood glucose activates sensing magnetic direction
Finally, we investigated the mechanism by which different magnetic orientations was manifested among starved men, unstarved men, and women irrespective of starvation. An analysis of raw data (Fig 2A, 2C and 2D, Fig A in S2 Fig) demonstrated that magnetic north orientation was remarkable only in the food association sessions in starved men (Fig 4A, top, middle), in consistent with the result (Fig 2D)”
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211826
What might this line of study reveal about ‘debunked’ ancient sciences like gardening by moon phase, dowsing, astrology, lay lines, and so on?
