Bad science
Pharyngula
Category archives for Bad science
No more mangled wee-wees!
Posted by PZ Myers on July 2, 2012 Mano Singham has discovered a good analysis of the claim that circumcision has health benefits. I agree with it entirely, because I looked at those same papers and came to the same conclusion a year ago! So they must be right. The analysis points out a few new things I hadn’t noticed, in addition to…
The wages of pseudoscience
Posted by PZ Myers on June 10, 2012 I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down. It’s genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it…
Near-death, rehashed
Posted by PZ Myers on April 30, 2012 The story so far: Mario Beauregard published a very silly article in Salon, claiming that Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) were proof of life after death, a claim that he attempted to support with a couple of feeble anecdotes. I replied, pointing out that NDEs are delusions, and his anecdotal evidence was not evidence at all. Now…
Adding dinosaurs always makes research sexier
Posted by PZ Myers on April 11, 2012 Sometimes, following the path scientific results take as they enter more mass media awareness really is like a game of telephone — you can scarcely recognize the original work in the final summary that ends up in the news media. And sometimes, you find that the scientists contributed to the ghastly mess. Take a look…
The Reason Rally ought to have some standards
Posted by PZ Myers on March 18, 2012 Oh, joy. Senator Tom Harkin will appear in a video message at the Reason Rally. While he may be a lifelong Catholic, as he declares in the announcement, and while he is one of the biggest supporters of acupuncture, chiropracty, herbal and homeopathic ‘healing’, and all the alt med bullshit he can fling millions of…
Why am I not surprised?
Posted by PZ Myers on March 17, 2012 James Inhofe, the ridiculous climate change denier, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and made a series of ridiculous claims. Among them was the claim that those wacky environmentalists were greatly outspending the entire energy industry on propaganda. Wait, what? The top five oil companies made $1 trillion in profits from 2011 through 2011, and…
The fake journal trend
Posted by PZ Myers on February 17, 2012 It’s really easy to set up a completely fake peer-reviewed journal, which is a great boon to pseudoscientists, quacks, creationists, and con artists. They can be tripped up, though, since they aren’t aware of all the inside jokes and strange habits of scientists. Here’s one, a journal called “Molecular Biology”, that was exposed because they…
Islamic science has come to this pitiful end
Posted by PZ Myers on January 29, 2012 The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu ‘aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download…
The comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable
Posted by PZ Myers on January 27, 2012 Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it’s bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation…
We still haven’t explained pink
Posted by PZ Myers on January 3, 2012 There was something else that bugged me in that odd claim from Ben Radford that girls would just naturally like pink better than boys: it was the terrible evpsych rationale for it that just made no sense. First was the argument that blue has always been associated with boys, and pink with girls, and therefore…