RETRACTION| VOLUME 29, ISSUE 15, P2595, AUGUST 05, 2019 Retraction Notice to: The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World Jean Decety, Jason M. Cowell, Kang Lee, Susan Malcolm-Smith, Bilge Selcuk, Xinyue Zhou, … DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.07.030
(Current Biology 25, 2951–2955; November 16, 2015) In our paper, we reported cross-cultural differences in how the religious environment of a child negatively impacted their sharing, their judgments of the actions of others, and how their parents evaluated them. An error in this article, our incorrect inclusion of country of origin as a covariate in many analyses, was pointed out in a correspondence from Shariff, Willard, Muthukrishna, Kramer, and Henrich
(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.06.031). When we reanalyzed these data to correct this error, we found that country of origin, rather than religious affiliation, is the primary predictor of several of the outcomes. While our title finding that increased household religiousness predicts less sharing in children remains significant, we feel it necessary to explicitly correct the scientific record, and we are therefore retracting the article. We apologize to the scientific community for any inconvenience caused.More.
But what was the paper doing in a biology journal anyway? Maybe the underlying assumptions should be unpacked.
Then there’s the whole question of whether “altruism” is a bogus concept, developed for just these purposes.
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Verse
(My emphases)
In other words, the researchers detected an error in their analysis and retracted the paper themselves voluntarily so that they could correct it. They also felt that the title finding was still significant in spite of the error. People make mistakes. Responsible people, when they find they have made one, admit it and try to put it right. This is science as a self-correcting enterprise maintaining the integrity of its work.
Seversy @ 2
Science should be self-correcting, yet Darwinists will always twist their lack of evidence into something they perceive should exist.
I’m guessing because it’s about cognition in humans, who (the last time I looked) considered to be living, and therefore worthy of study in biology.
Bornagain @ 1
Another well cited response. You summed up Darwinists perfectly with the following, …narrows the definition of the word almost into nothingness.
We are dealing with people that do not value truth. They will twist anything to fit their agenda, regardless of the lack of evidence. Words are nothing more than a means to torture their thoughts to sound reasonable, but you cannot get reason from an unreasonable mind.
Seversky states:
No it is NOT “science as a self-correcting enterprise maintaining the integrity of its work.” Science itself could care less about being wrong. “Science” is not a person. It takes a conscious person to be concerned about being right or wrong and to be concerned about the objective morality of maintaining integrity in his science.
And yet, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic foundation, hold that both objective morality and even persons themselves are illusory. Yet it takes a real person being concerned about real objective morality to tell the truth even when it inconveniences them. Darwinists can account for none of that.
Nor can Seversky account for the origin of science itself which he apparently envisions as somehow being free from the pride and prejudices of its practitioners . Science was born out of the Christian worldview, not out of his atheistic worldview, ( a Christian worldview which holds, among other things, that we are obligated to tell the truth even when it inconveniences us).
Science, especially since it is practiced by people with all their inherent flaws, is not some type of measuring device that can give you an accurate measurement regardless of the bias of whomever is doing the measuring, but science is subjected to all the pride and prejudices of the people who are practicing it. In many instances, extreme measures must be taken to eliminate potential bias of the researcher(s).
As Feynman stated, “you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”
As an example of implicit bias that is inherent in scientists themselves, (and as was mentioned on another thread yesterday), studies now establish that the design inference is ‘knee jerk’ inference that is built into everyone, especially including atheists, and that atheists have to mentally work suppressing their “knee jerk” design inference!
i.e. It is not that Atheists do not see purpose and/or Design in nature and biology, (nor is it a case that Atheists have any empirical evidence for their claim that the design we see in the universe and life is an ‘illusion), it is that Atheists, for whatever severely misguided reason, live in denial of the purpose and/or Design that they themselves see in nature. And yes, ‘denialism’ is considered a mental illness. (denialism is an especially prevalent factor in treating drug addiction and alcoholism)
Perhaps the two most famous quotes of atheists suppressing their innate ‘design inference’ are the following two quotes:
Thus in conclusion, Seversky’s belief that science is some sort of self correcting enterprise is shown to be an Utopian fantasy on his part. A Utopian fantasy that simply does not exist in the real world. Science, especially when it come to these issues of Origins, especially ID vs. Darwinism, is shown to be severely hampered by the a-priori prejudices of its practitioners.
Verse: