Bad science
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Category archives for Bad science
Aaargh! Physicists! Again!
Posted by PZ Myers on November 20, 2012 A while back, two physicists, Paul Davies and Charles Lineweaver, announced their explanation for cancer with a novel theory, which is theirs, that cancers are atavisms recapitulating in a Haeckelian reverse double backflip their premetazoan ancestry. They seemed very proud of their idea. I was aghast, as you might guess. They even claimed that human…
The science of antediluvian plushies
Posted by PZ Myers on November 18, 2012 One creationist claim that’s commonly laughed at is this idea that 8 people could build a great big boat, big enough to hold all the ‘kinds’ of animals, and that those same 8 people were an adequate work force to maintain all those beasts for a year in a confined space on a storm-tossed ark.…
Jonathan Wells talks about history
Posted by PZ Myers on September 27, 2012 Oh, boy. Jonathan Wells explains why some of us reject the outrageous interpretations made from the ENCODE work claiming 80%+ functionality of the genome. It was really an effort to get past this sentence. Some historical context might help. Bwahahahahaha! First sentence, he makes a joke. Wells is a creationist clown notorious for his tortured…
Satoshi Kanazawa is back
Posted by PZ Myers on September 10, 2012 Now he’s got a gig at Big Think. Kanazawa, you may recall, is the evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who loves to make racist arguments and then go racing to the data to find selective support for them; he’s a terrible scientist. I’m no big fan of evolutionary psychology, not because I…
Fish are not inside-out insects
Posted by PZ Myers on August 29, 2012 It’s a shame I have to say that right from the beginning. I’m beginning to develop a distaste for computer models of biological processes, which is a shame. From Andrulis to Fleury to Pivar, the field is tainted with people who don’t know a lick of biology but are good at inventing algorithms that go…
Live by statistics, die by statistics
Posted by PZ Myers on August 13, 2012 There is a magic and arbitrary line in ordinary statistical testing: the p level of 0.05. What that basically means is that if the p level of a comparison between two distributions is less than 0.05, there is a less than 5% chance that your results can be accounted for by accident. We’ll often say…
Alt Med does harm
Posted by PZ Myers on July 27, 2012 I always hear this argument that, well, maybe those herbs and enemas don’t help that much, but they don’t hurt, and they make people feel better, so get off alternative medicine’s back. Right. Because distractions from real medicine don’t affect the legitimate work being done. You might want to read this criticism of the National…
Burzynski is still bilking dying children
Posted by PZ Myers on July 19, 2012 And credulous newspapers are helping that quack. The latest case is a little girl in Ireland with a disfiguring and deadly rhabdomyosarcoma who is trying to raise money to get the useless and totally fraudulent Burzynski antineoplaston treatment … and this article makes the good point that newspapers are helping to defraud sick people. Both…
And everyone gets a robot pony!
Posted by PZ Myers on July 14, 2012 Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance: The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain,…
Did Ancient Aliens visit the earth and guide human evolution?
Posted by PZ Myers on July 9, 2012 No. One other event I participated in was a “debate” with an ancient alien theorist. It was very peculiar, as you might guess. The way this came about was that Scotty Roberts, the alien astronaut fan, proposed a session on his wacky speculations, and the conference organizers didn’t want such lunacy to sail through without…