Do you feel the politically correct retard scientific investigation?

Question

Recently some at University of Chicago voted to deny Dr. Bruce T. Lahn (a world class genetics researcher) tenure because he had discovered several recent mutations in genes associated with brain development & evolution. This was mainly due to the fact that these genes were rare in Africa & "might" be used by some to "suggest" that Africans were not as evolved as many that migrated out of Africa.
Isn't it time we grew up & took scientific knowledge for just that? Lahn was granted tenure, but stopped all research on the genes associated with the human brain & evolution.

patois:
What would you call self imposed ignorance?

Genetic researchers have identified something approaching 50 haplogroups associated with human evolution & genetic diseases are far more likely to be associated with some haplo groups than others... skin color really has little to do with haplogroup, but geographic location of ancestors (evolution) does.

Patrick I:
You have to admit that the Neanderthal is the most likely candidate for the gene introgression. I, like you, can hardly wait for the complete H.Neanderthal genome to be sequenced. I see very little evidence the gene could have come from Asia due to the time constraints of getting to Asia & back to the ME before major migrations took place.

Patrick I:
Chuckle... you sorta made my case for me. Lahn's main sin was failing to understand the politics of political correctness. It is not that he isn't a fine researcher with much to offer in his field, but that he fails to understand American/University politics. Now if he were to support the regional hypothesis of sapien evolution & be an anthropologist no one would question his support of a hypothesis that should have been discredited years ago.

patois:
OK, since you quantified your 1st statement, we can basically agree that knowledge can be misapplied... but our salvation may be the use of nuclear power as an energy source & it has many more useful applications than destructive ones... we've faced that since the discovery of fire.

Patrick I:
yes I did read about the other gene his team found... this one was a simple mutation of a number of base pairs & not on the scale of an introgressed gene. More like a tubal virus than a completely new gene... but a significant change. I did not agree with his assessment of the value of that gene & he didn't say a great deal about it... other than the timing.

NOYESNO:
If science always followed the approach you suggest, we'd still be debating fire in the dark while we ate raw meat. We will always have people misuse scientific advances & some will even run down others with the automobile & buy smoke belching behemoths to pollute as much as possible... but solar cells are great, until someone finds a way to kill people with them.

coop 366:
Chuckle, I'm a mite peeved Lahn caved in too, but remember he is Chinese & was driven from China for his views there... so I figure he is a mite gun shy. Chuckle, no pun intended.

Patrick I:
I sure didn't give you the thumbs down. That indicates a drastic disagreement... which I did give to one responder, before she modified her statement. Asking a question costs 5 points & you get 10 for each answer selected as the best... 2 for answering a question. Welcome aboard, you are an intelligent & obviously mature person.

I forgot to tell you that in addition to the 10 points for a correct answer you get 1 point for each thumbs up & lose one point for a thumbs down when selected as the best answer. so 10 points for the correct answer & 1 point for each thumbs up, minus one point for each thumbs down... they count only if your answer is best.

The main theme of Lahn's hypothesis is that a gene must confer some reproductive advantage to a population to show a rapid & drastic rise in frequency as the afore mentioned genes did. I believe he indicated 85% of the M.E. & European population had a gene that came into existance only 5,800 yrs ago & 70% of the World's population had the one that happened 37,000 yrs ago.

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I think you are mischaracterizing what Lahn's research was about. The gene was identified because defective versions of the gene in question caused the reduced brain size among M.E. & Asian populations that had the gene. This led to a much wider sampling & determination that the gene in question was completely different in some populations.

Patrick 1:
Why don't you do some research on the thought that the gene has something to do with the birth of offspring. I know women from West Africa tend to have premature births & low birth weights more often than others. I've read somewhere that it is true accross all economic classes.
I'm not in the habit of posting my ideas that are set in concrete & have always considered an objective detracting opinion to be far more valuable than one that agreed with me. Perhaps the reason I was often picked a project manager... some of your opinions I will research & I plan to look at Lahn's hypothesis a bit closer. Time is running out so I'll have to get moving.

Off the subject... East Africans are genetically very different from West Africans, other than skin color they are genetically very close to Europeans & Mid Easterners... of course this would fit into the "out of Africa" hypothesis. Due to the slave trade, the majority of the African American population is from West Africa... unfortunately researchers have not broken American statistics down into haplogroups. Still birth weight is a significant factor in both survivability & later success in cognitive development.

Chuckle, I seldom get a quality answer to scientific questions, but for the rare occasion that i do, I continue to ask them.

Patrick:
Yes I got both links.
I think you definately have enough information to justify further investigation in this area. If well nourished mothers did indeed die at the rate your data seems to indicate, the introduction of a gene to counter that would be a very positive selection factor. It would quickly become the dominate gene. The fact that it seems to have happened around time of the agricultural revolution would add to your argument. You may have enough for a study grant as is... but I suspect you have competition already.

Related links:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5127a1.htm
http://www.futureofchildren.org/information2827/information_show.html?doc_id=256518

I'm a cattle rancher, retired EE running the family ranch. Working on a rotary engine I designed & filed a patent application on. In addition I write device driver applications programs on a consulting basis for firms willing to pay the price. Chuckle, I could bore you with the details & problems associated with my ultra effecient rotary engine that is a hybrid steam/combustion engine (capturing most heat to assist in driving the rotary engine.) My engine has been prototyped & has some amazing potential due to the simplicity & low number of moving parts. In short my plate is full due to the fact that I am also raising my youngest son (10 yrs old). Due to my age & the fact that I need to finish some of these projects before I croak, I mainly encourage others to take on long term projects.

Answer 1

He could not have been rejected a tenure for having discovered the gene mutations, as you are suggesting. The rejection would have to be due to how he is hypothesizing from his evidence. This is not to say that his hypotheses are necessarily incorrect, look at Raymond Dart, he was extricated from British Anthropolgy for yeilding unfavourable hypothesis regarding human evolution not being of European orgin and subsequently sent to S. Africa where he ended up being a part of some significant archaeological work that vindicated his beliefs in an out-of-africa theory for the evolution and migration of the homo species. From the evidence, however, Dart also hypothesized that humans evolved because of a savanna environment which was the predominant environment from which his fossils were found, but this is now known to be wrong because the earliest hominid sites in africa now predate the savanna period of Africa. So people get some stuff right and some stuff wrong, but the trick is not to jump the gun and to be sure to use the right qualifiers to portray an appropriate level of probability so as not to cut your legs out from under yourself. Anyways you get bucked from the contemporary system if you don't buy into contemporary thought, but this is because of ones hypotheses, not because of their evidence. Even Lahn himself has played down his earlier hypothesis of the neanderthal gene radiating from 37,000 years ago and has now more generally portrayed the neanderthal as a being a good chance of being its source, but is no longer emphasizing the neanderthal as strongly. Truthfully speaking this gene could have radiated from Asia or the Middle East as well because his strongest evidence seems to be the genes lower prevalence in Africa. I have also seen him down play his findings by stating that he'll have a better picture once the neanderthal genome has been fully mapped, which obviously shows that he was jumping the gun a bit in how he portrayed and quantified his earliest hypotheses. It is also difficult to fully jump on board with his ideas seeing as their is none and probably never will be any DNA evidence from archaic Homo species in the Middle East or in Asia because the conditions in these locations were not favourable to the preservation of DNA, so even if the DNA evidence of the neanderthal genome increase the empiricle evidence to support his hypothesis, without being able to compare it against Asian and Middle Eastern genome projects there will still be room for doubt until new empiricle evidence is brought into the discussion to further clarify this question. From a clearly geographical perspective it could be suggested that since the Middle east is the corridor from which these many migrations occured that it is this area of the world where the similar groups of Homo were more alike because of a continuous gene flow between groups that hindered complete speciation and that it was here where any such gene mutation from archaic populations was able to radiate throughout the world. Its lower occurance in Africa would have been because Homo sapien was already spreading out from there and for the gene to increase it's prevalence it would now have to go against the flow of this migration, but for me to say this is pure conjecture and could only be classified as a rudimentary hypothesis and I would not likely ever start publishing this as a contending idea to Lahn's hypothesis without having much more DNA and archaeological evidence to back this up as a counter hypothesis. It could be this nature of stepping out on weak as of yet not fully developed limbs of contentious evolution that the University of Chicago is not particularily impressed with, rather then the actual gene research itself?
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Regarding your details that you added on, I don't think that this particular case is about "most likely", I think it comes down to the presentation of ones hypothesis. Unfortunately Universities are not usually just concerned with science, there is a lot of politics involved as well. You could be the greatest scientist in the world, but if you throw out too many contentious ideas and do not know how to present your ideas properly and navigate the politics of the university and the scientific community at large, then you have just shot yourself in the foot, and it is this that Lahn has done. One way around this is to persevere with your hypothesis until it proves itself against future empiricle evidence and become a proper theory. If you singlehandedly stood for and supported the rise of a strong enough theory then once such a bridge has been crossed all the universities will be chopping at the bit to sign you as tenure for your name recognition in order to attract students and their tuition, but until then a scientist can NOT ignore the politics of the University that they choose to pursue their career at. Anyways, if Lahn's hypotheses were as strong as he makes them out to be then the University of Chicago's tenure would really not be the issue as many other universities would be throwing tenure offers at him left right and center, the problem is that there is not as yet have the empiricle evidence for Lahn to be able to display these hypotheses as he does... hence university political suicide. Don't worry, if he is truly on the right track then he will eventually go down as a great thinker of evolutionary genetics, lets hope that it is not posthumous regognition as it was for Raymond Dart, if this truly is the case! But for his own sake if he wants to thrive within the American University system he may want to try and integrate more with the political process at these universities. This does not mean that he has to rewrite his ideas, just assign them the appropriate quantifiers right from their indoctrination into scientific publication. Universities love forward thinking scientists, but not ones that portray their ideas based on so much conjecture that they open themselves and their universities up for ridicule if this conjecture proves to be incorrect. If you want tenure it is actually good to be forward thinking like Lahn is, but you have to cover your butt as well because no University wants any of their departments to get blindsided by future empiricle evidence that you have left yourself wide open too. Better to put in those qualifiers from the beginning for the purposes of damage control. Don't forget, universities get most of their finances from tuitions and if you can't conduct a proper damage control in order to maintain the university's reputation if their scientist's are not quantifying their hypothesis correctly. Signing such scientists as tenure and directly tying them into that department could be a serious financial blunder. I think there is a lot less "political correctness" in this issue then just being a University of Chicago politics/financial issue.
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I did some further reading regarding this Lahn fellow. Apparently a similar brain mutation occured around 6000 years ago, in the middle east, as this was obviously NOT connected to interbreeding with any archaic species, gene mingling between species is further reduced as the enabling agent of such mutations and therefore he directly contradicts the strength of his earlier hypothesis by now announcing that a similar mutation occured independently of such interactions. This begs me to wonder why he didn't leave the introduction of the 37,000 gene mutation as more vague in its presentation, at least until he has gathered the appropriate empiricle evidence, ie waiting to see the conclusion of the neanderthal genome project before making such bold statements about the genes introduction. The more I read about this guy the more I can see that he is bold and revolutionary in his thoughts, but incredibly inept in his politics such that he can't seem to contain his ideas before he goes about publishing in some of the most prestigious journals only to contradict himself at a later time because of being overzealous in his original conclussions. Despite Lahn's scientific intentions to trailblaze the field of genetics with new ideas and bold thoughts, his actual implementation of publishing his findings without adequate empiricle support and how he promotes his controversial ideas is actually a mark of bad-science. The peer review process is important, but one should at least get their hypothesis supported at a credible level before they subject them to this peer review process. I think that mostly this is a sign of his youth and immaturity as a scientist and this rejection of tenure will actually do him more good then bad as he should now be more willing to see the benefits of working from within the system to trailblaze as opposed to working against it. It looks to me like he wants to be famous before his time, but doing it in a way that will make him infamous before his time.
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At this point the "regional hypothesis" is really not supported, especially since the original conclusions from the neanderthal DNA studies. For Lahn to jump into this group of anthropologists might make him some friends there, but with people who are grasping at straws so this would not bring him support from the Anthro/Genetic fields at large. Irregardless of where he plants his feet he still needs to produce overwhelming DNA evidence that works in concert with the neanderthal genome project. As it is, I think that if he were to jump into that group of anthropologists he would be throwing himself in with a rather desperate lot which would not help him gain credibility for his future hypotheses as desperation breeds the same academic crime that Lahn is already guilty of, that of being too out there and reaching in the construction of his hypothetical conclussions.
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The percentages claim a reproductive advantage and to do this is correct, that is just evolution 101. His biggest mistakes are in overhypothesizing what the actual reproductive benefits were before uncovering the empirical evidence to support his hypotheses, and his hypotheses moreover are still as-of-yet not proven. Just because the gene in question appears to be one that counteracts microcephalin, does not mean that all populations that do not carry this gene will have smaller heads and a reduced intelligence. African peoples surely do not have smaller heads nor are they less intelligent so it can be assumed that evolution has provided them with an alternative sollution which performs a similar function as to what the MCPH1 gene performs for Eurasian and New World populations and if it hasn't then the gene is obviously not expressing itself in this regard becuase that is clearly not the case when we compare these modern populations, at least there is no drastic difference that could even pretend to allow some kind of reproductive success that could have spread as fast as the evidence shows that it did spread at. So what expression this gene truly has that effects reproductive success is still truly unknown and I could alternatively hypothesize that by having this gene it controls foetal head size so that the birth process is more successful in the populations which carry this gene thus increasing their reproductive sucess of its carriers drastically yet having nothing to do with intelligence or thought capabilities in the mature population. I wouldn't be surprised actually if this is what the gene is actually doing... just assisting in the birth process because the foetal head size is extremely important for the safety of the baby and its mother. For me to hypothesize this is no more right or wrong then Lahn's hypotheses given the empirical evidence which is currently present. Lahn also made a grevious error in overhypothesizing the probability of the origins of these genetic mutations as if it were near certainly from neanderthal interbreeding before the empirical evidence had been found to support his conclussions of how this mutation was introduced. He may be right in some of his conclussions, we don't know yet, but I feel that he jumped the gun and that has made his host University shy of taking him on as a tenure employee, because a scientist that conducts his scientific business in this way can be dangerous.
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What you have written in your latest additional detail fits into my mind and into what I have written quite well... can you be more precise on how you feel I have mischaracterized this genes expression in either the healthy or defective forms, or how I have misinterpreted Lahn's research? If you are more precise then perhaps I can attempt to elucidate whatever point I was trying to make? Thanks Ed.
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Well, research on birth measurements I have not done, but I do have some personal experience that was fueling my hypothesis. My wife is East African, where as I am of European descent. After reading all this stuff about this gene I began to think that perhaps the African adaptation towards the same problem was in their bone morphology. It is well documented that the spinal curvature of African's is more curved, and on a hunch I was also wondering if their females pelvic canals might be wider as their own adaptation to adjust to foetal head size. Then on top of this, perhaps I'm a carrier of the MCPH1 gene seeing as it is predominant in my ethnic group? These two adaptations put together, therefore, should result in a double easing of the birth process if my assumptions are correct. As it turns out when my wife goes into labour (twice so far) she has what the doctors refer to as "precipitous deliveries" whereby they take about 2 hours from the first weak contractions until their completion. She also seems to do it all in stride without complaining of much pain. Here in America where we had our second the doctors were mystified by her nonchalance, good humour and comfort levels as she went through the delivery process. Anyways, I didn't really mean to put my personal experiences in this public forum, but seeing as it was relevant to the topic I decided what the hey. My marriage to an African may also be why I'm not particularily enthused by Lahn's conclusions either, because it is my belief that, well I may be more logical then my wife, she is actually quicker at thinking on her feet. Of course we are just individuals and all populations have variability, but having divided my life between living in modern caucasian dominated countries with living in developing black East African countries, my own experiences here also tell me that differential intelligence between these two seperate culture sets are not disparate enough to have that great an effect on reproductive success. Even within each country, moreover, there is such a great disparity between intelligence and reproductive success, but seemingly in the opposite direction to what Lahn is proposing, all this combined just gives me the feeling that Lahn's hypothesis just doesn't quite feel right. By this I mean to say that it actually seems that people who succeed because of a seemingly greater intelligence in both of these cultural sets seem to also actually produce less children, at least in modern times. It seems that when a family knows that their children are secure in the world because of their success and the resources that that success provides them with, that they tend to start focusing on the quality of the care that they provide for their children thus concentrating their resources into fewer children. Perhaps the MCPH1 is actually the "stupid" gene in that it actually overrides this common sense approach to having children? Which means I must be a carrier because I have always wanted to have 5+ children. Anyways, now I'm just talking freely without really thinking about the consequences of the ideas that I'm throwing out there, so let me shut up now!
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I was trying to find some data on differential foetal head circumference between different ethnic populations, either the raw data between countries or better yet within one country whereby living and nutritional conditions might be more at par. I don't know if "head circumference" is a taboo issue to try and determine, but it proved very difficult to find any set of data that could provide me with the statistical set that I am looking for to try and strengthen or weaken my hypothesis. I did see a lot of studies that correlated birth weight, where African cultures across the board showed a lower birth weight, only to be outdone by areas around Bangladesh, but obviously Bangladesh is famous for their nutritional inefficiencies as well. With this search route becoming tiring and unfruitful I instead moved over to look into caesarian rates and found an interesting study that compared ethnic caesarian rates in East London. In this study it can be seen that birth intervention is more common in African and Middle Eastern Populations, be it operative vaginal delivery or caesarian, however on further examination it is revealed that African women actually had a very low prevalence of operative vaginal delivery, but the highest rate of caesarian Section. This supports my hypothesis because given an increased nutritional access the lack of the MCPH1 in african populations, based on my assumptions, should result in larger foetal size and head circumference with higher nutritional inputs thus resulting in a greater occurrence of caesarian sections occurring in this group when exposed to better nutrition. This trend in increased caesarian deliveries for African descendants in developed nations is further supported in their comparison section: "24% increased risk of CS in ‘blacks’ compared with ‘whites’ found in a Californian study, which included 150 000 women" and "The National Sentinel Caesarean Section Audit in England and Wales found a 60% increased risk of Caesarean section for ‘Black African’ women, and 19% increased risk for ‘Black Caribbean’ women, but no other ethnic group was found to be at higher risk" This last quote further strengthens my hypothesis if we assume that since the Caribbean women are the descendants of the slave trade and recognize that their was some gene flow between European and African groups during this process such that there should be a higher occurrence of the MCPH1 genes in this group then in recent African immigrants and thus they should have a decreased CS rate when compared to their African cousins as is seen.
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As fun as it would be to pursue such a study, I think that I will leave it to the competition. Digging up a bit of statistical support along ethnic lines is one thing, but the scope of a project that endeavoured to prove that the MCPH1 gene was responsible for a higher success in birth would involve a large number of genetic test$$$. I suppose that one would not have to actually do case studies on current mothers, but you would still have to have access to the individuals from these past studies and then do a barrage of genetic tests to see if the MCPH1 gene had a higher occurence in the children of non caesarian births vs the lack of MCPH1 gene being more prominent in deliveries of children that resulted in CS. Of course this would not just be within black populations, but within all ethnic groups. If the assumption is correct then in the normal deliveries in all ethnic groups it should be expected to see that many of the children birthed normally were carriers of the MCPH1 gene, and conversely it should be expected that there should be an even greater chance of difficulty during delivery if the child being birthed was a NON MCPH1 gene carrier. Since mother nature usually provides more then one gene combination to combat most problems it could be expected that many normal births could still be NON MCPH1 gene carriers, but considering this genes rate of spread, I would expect that the children that were giving their mothers problems during birth to be almost completely void of MCPH1 gene carriers, because it seems that this was a very successful gene and if this is indeed the cause of its success I would expect that it would selected against very seldom indeed. The study should also focus on first time mothers only because it is in the first birth where most problems arise and by the second birth the mothers body becomes more accustomed to the delivery process as is seen by repeat mothers generally having quicker deliveries with less discomfort over multiple births. Also, it is not always the case, but some mothers will have CS's repeatedly once they have had one, so the CS of the second or third child would be because of the original CS and not be reflective of the genetic makeup of the later children. By this I mean, seeing as it is the genes of the child that will determine its growth inutero a NON MCPH1 gene carrier could force the CS in the mothers first delivery but her subsequent children could be MCPH1 carriers but now the parents opt for CS because the scar is already there and they have become scared of the birth process because of their first CS. Anyways, needless to say, it would be easiest to keep the study to first deliveries, although a case could also be made for first CS deliveries as well, in that as pregnancies do tend to get easier and if a mother had three normally and then had an emergency CS with the fourth, this is an interesting case to see if two or three of the initial children were MCPH1 gene carriers and then the CS a NON MCPH1 carrier. Anyways, I'm just babbling on about methodologies here, but I'm not a geneticist nor a biologist so I don't think that I would be able to attract the kind of funding that would be neccesary to conduct such a vast number of genetic tests! I don't know what you do for a living ED, but feel free to jump on this one if you want! I would be happy to help you do your write up based on the data, irregardless of if it supported my hypothesis or not...

I had to cut an earlier chunk out, it seems that I have written the mystery limit and when I try and post all that I wrote comes up as blank...

Answer 2

I think he might be right but he did not go far enough. To be in this field and make a statement as he did and not do farther studies, that is a sin against science. If you went back read my addition to my answer you may see where I am coming from. There are so many questions and so few answers. No I do not feel retard, dah what was the question.

Answer 3

"political correctness" is really just Stalinist social engineering. I learned all I needed to know about the leftist agenda by reading 1984.

Their attempt to manipulate thoughts by manipulating language (and as you say, scientific inquiry) is an attempt to force a new religion on mankind. Their dogmas are predominant and any scientific, cultural or artistic threat to that newspeak dogma is silenced. Not by bloodshed yet, but that is only cause they're currently limited to the universities.

Answer 4

I took a category on developmental disabilities and my professor stated that you simply will have to continually use "man or woman first" language whilst describing anyone with distinctive demands. Because they don't seem to be their situation - the man or woman isn't outlined by means of their incapacity. For example " Maria has a analysis of intellectual retardation" no longer "Maria is mentally retarded"

Answer 5

Science should have some ethics,though it rarely does.If the results of those studies are going to cause great social division within our society then obviously thats something they have to consider.I am part black and of course take enormous offense to being told I am intellectually defunct and useless in your linear view of evolution.Science generally is left brained,dispassionate, rational and doesnt care much for the social or emotional costs of what they are undertaking.But there are things we as society value more than aquired knowledge and social cohesion is one of them.You are free to study whatever you like regardless of what we as as a society value.

Answer 6

What if anthropologists have been lying to us for ideological reasons. our specie is homo, our race is sapiens sapiens.
in other species, there are big morphological differences between the races: think about dogs, monkeys. between humans, our differences are small.: skin color, form of eyes, nose, hair. there is only one human race left, the man of Neanderthal, the man of java who were the other human races are extinct. therefore racism has no base, but people are culturist, tribist, ethnicist . still, it is no quite the same than to be racist.

Answer 7

Racism is a mental and social disease. Objective knowledge should never be repressed. It happens, though, in fascist crusades of social engineering. What humanity has a right to suppress, though, are noxious applications of objective knowledge. For example, although the objective comprehension of atomic energy is natural and good, the subjective application of atomic energy to use as a nuclear bomb is noxious. Humanity struggles to avoid such diseased, noxious applications of knowledge. The rise of humanity above savagery has been based on how healthy and wise our choices are in this matter of application of knowledge.

To argue that the suppression of nuclear bombs is equal to the suppression of knowledge is dishonorable. That screwed up logic doesn't cut the mustard among people with any honor and real intelligence. It is a perversion of the human spirit to screw these concepts around. The INTENT of people who distort logic like that is not in any real search for truth but to support their own vicious agendas and fascist delusions of social engineering. That is morbid and noxious.

Another example of this is found in the flame wars occurring over in YA 's Gender category. Someone with a sick "social engineering agenda" posted a similar question recently about the size of women's brains compared to the size of men's brains. That person's agenda was to show "inferiority". That agenda is noxious and no good. His screwed logic included the sophmoric misconception that male and female brains can be compared. They cannot. They differ significantly in other ways than size as much as oranges differ from apples, chemically / hormonally / electromagnetically / areas of concentrated energy / areas of use during functions / speeds of neural activity and communication between sides of the brain, etc. That is common knowledge among educated people such as physicians, nurses, physiologists, etc. To cheery-pick one particular variance to compare is lousy thinking. To compare for the purpose of "proving" inferiority hails from a diseased, malicious mind, is noxious and warrants suppression.

The question truly intelligent people ask when they compare is not, "Will this knowledge support my delusions of superiority?", but, "How will this knowledge benefit humanity?" Nuclear weapons, misogyny and racism are losers in that process. Just FYI, the ascension above the monkeydom, so to say, of feeling the need to suppress others in order to feel superior is the hallmark of true wisdom and intelligence.

Edit: We should not suppress objective KNOWLEDGE. But, we most certainly should suppress noxious choices for how to APPLY knowledge. Highly recognized as noxious are applications that "reduce" a segment of people. Ethical research seeks to "empower" people. There is no good in seeking ascension for oneself through the reduction of others.