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Encounters with gigantic orangutans

Over the past couple of months I've been reading John MacKinnon's In Search of the Red Ape (Collins, 1974) - one of the first books anyone reads whenever they want to learn about orangutans. The book is stuffed full of anecdotes and other natural history tales about Borneo and Sumatra, and it seems that MacKinnon (who, these days, is best known for his association with the discovery of the Saola Pseudoryx nghetinensis in Vietnam (MacKinnon 2000, Van Dung et al. 1993, 1994)) encountered just about every creature you could hope to encounter in the tropical jungles of the region... yes, even…

Another Round On Specified Complexity

There's a famous short story by Woody Allen called “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers” that I like to reread from time to time. (It's very short, so follow the link if you've never read it before.) The story is told through the correspondence of Gossage and Vardebedian, as they argue about a game of postal chess in which they are engaged. There's one excerpt that keeps coming back to me, since it applies so perfectly in so many contexts: Received your latest letter today, and while it was just shy of coherence, I think I can see where your bewilderment lies. From your enclosed diagram, it…

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design Chapter 5: Part 1 - Honesty Matters

For my contribution to the Panda's Thumb's ongoing review of Jonathan Wells' new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (PIGDID), I will be reviewing chapters four and five. Chapter Four covers the record of evolution that is contained in the DNA of all living things, and Chapter Five discusses speciation. A full review of each of these chapters is going to take a while and wind up being rather long. I've divided the reviews up into chunks, and I'm going to post each chunk as I finish it. Comments are more than welcome, and might be helpful when the time…

The annals of "I'm not antivaccine," part 14: Vaccine "Trafficking" and beyond

If there's one good thing about the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak that is continuing to spread, if there can be a "good thing" about an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease that didn't have to happen, it's that it's put the antivaccine movement on the defensive. They are definitely feeling the heat. Their reaction to that heat can range from ever more vigorously proclaiming that they are "not antivaccine" in a desperate bid to convince the unwary and those not familiar with the antivaccine movement that they are not antivaccine, all the while softening their antivaccine tropes…

Using the lie that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury to try to exonerate another accused child abuser (one last word)

On Friday, I wrote about the sort of case that outrages me every bit as much as cases of cancer quackery that lead to the death of patients. I'm referring to the case of Amanda Sadowsky, a four month old infant who died after suffering traumatic brain injuries that appeared consistent with shaken baby syndrome (SBS). As I've pointed out before, what I've found to be one of the most disturbing antivaccine claims of all is the assertion that SBS is a "misdiagnosis for vaccine injury." As you might recall, SBS is the name originally given to a triad of findings consisting of subdural hemorrhage…

More anti-vaccine nonsense from an old friend on (where else?) The Huffington Post

Here we go again. You may have noticed that I've been laying off that repository of quackery, autism pseudoscience, and anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post. I assure you, it's not because things have gotten much better there. Oh, sure, occasionally someone will try to post something resembling science and rationality, but it's impossible for so few to overcome so much history and so much woo. Indeed, even when someone tries, he can't help but be sucked into the morass of pseudoscience that is HuffPo. For example, Dr. Harvey Karp (the same guy who went toe-to-toe with Dr. Jay Gordon--…

David Kirby's "logic": The hepatitis B vaccine may increase the risk of multiple sclerosis, so it's obvious that vaccines cause autism

It's really hard to take David Kirby seriously any more. Well, actually, it's been hard to take him seriously for at nearly four years now, ever since he wrote his paean to antivaccinationists, Evidence of Harm, in which no conspiracy-mongering related to mercury as an alleged cause of autism was too out there, too ridiculous, for Kirby to parrot. Since then, he's become antivaccine apologist number one, the go-to guy for the antivaccine movement whenever the twisting of science, logic, and reason was needed to spin an event or a study that refutes the "vaccines cause autism" hypothesis. He's…

If you want some cancer woo, and you want it now, who ya gonna call? Mike Adams!

In a way, I have to hand it to Mike Adams. As you may recall, Mike Adams is the man behind what is arguably one of the top two or three woo-filled sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com (formerly known as NewsTarget.com). I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example of someone who can deliver delusional paranoid conspiracy-mongering against the FDA, CDC, and big pharma, antivaccination lunacy, overblown claims about cancer, and (in my considered medical opinion, of course), dangerous cancer quackery, all in one tidy, ranting package. Sometimes the stuff Adams writes is so over-the-top that I…

A Case Study in Creationist Distortion

Back in June of 2004, I wrote an essay about the varying degrees of credibility among creationists (with people like Kurt Wise and Art Chadwick at the top and people like Kent Hovind and Karl Priest at the bottom) that included a snarky little tidbit about William Gibbons. Gibbons describes himself as holding a "Ph.D., in Creation Science Apologetics summa cum laude, Emmanuel College of Christian Studies, Springdale, Arkansas." I made a snippy comment or two about that and said: But Gibbons' bio gets even better. Under "special achievements", he actually lists "Conducted four expeditions to…

A "defense" of Abraham Cherrix and his parents?

I really have to turn off my Google Alerts for this topic. I'm going to pull out my hair if I don't. As you may recall, I've been posting about two young victims of the siren call of quackery who will most likely pay with their lives for their trust in quacks. The first, Katie Wernecke, rejected conventional medicine in Texas several months ago and is now at an undisclosed location receiving "secret" treatments, her father claiming that he can't reveal what treatment she is receiving or the doctors will stop treating her. The second, Abraham Cherrix, has gotten permission to leave Virginia to…

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton join John McCain in pandering to antivaccinationists

Ack! Well, so much for Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's reputations for supposedly being well-informed about scientific issues. True, they didn't sink as far into the stupid as John McCain did about vaccines and autism, but what they said was bad enough. Let's put it this way: If David Kirby thinks what they said about vaccines and autism is just great, they seriously need to fire all their medical advisors and get new ones who know how to evaluate evidence: No matter who wins in Pennsylvania today, the next President of the United States will support research into the growing evidence of…

User Fees for Expedited Drug Reviews: Part of the Problem, not Part of the Solution

By David Michaels In the wake of the debacles involving Vioxx, Ketek, and other dangerous drugs that should never have been approved in the first place, Congress is about to take up reauthorization of the user fee system that funds the Food and Drug Administrationâs drug review process. The system is governed by the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), which will expire this year. The FDA has asked Congress to reauthorize the program for five more years. Yesterday, a group of 22 experts on drug safety and regulation issued an open letter to lawmakers asking them not to reauthorize the…

Women, Ramadan, and Food

It's Ask a Science Blogger time again.... ...A reader asks: Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you? Here's hoping my doctor and pharmacist SiBlings will take on this question and give us a medical perspective. I'm going to approach "is it good for you?" from some other directions. In this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, ten women share memories of Ramadan, traditions from their home countries, and offer up a few family recipes. Ramadan and fasting sounds like it is very good for them. In Istanbul, women embroider handkerchiefs…

Multitasking, Part 1

Back around 1987 I picked up a Commodore Amiga 1000. This was an interesting little box for home computers of the day. In the late eighties the typical home/office PC was running MS-DOS and had a whopping 640k bytes of memory. The Amiga didn't look like the average home computer and it certainly didn't behave like one. For starters, it had a graphical user interface (popularized by the Mac a year or two earlier) and a two button mouse. Unlike the average Mac, it was color (4096 color palette). Further, it had a choice of screen resolutions including 640x400 interlaced. While those numbers…

The Texas Medical Board finally gets off its tuchas and acts against Dr. Rolando Arafiles, Jr.

There's one thing I like to emphasize to people who complain that this blog exists only to "bash 'alternative' medicine," and that's that it doesn't. This blog exists, besides to champion science and critical thinking (and, of course, to feed my ravenous ego), in order to champion medicine based on science against all manner of dubious practices. Part of that purpose involves understanding and accepting that science-based medicine is not perfect. It is not some sort of panacea. Rather, it has many shortcomings and all too often does not live up to its promise. Our argument is merely that,…

Hunger games: Congress targets food assistance for the most vulnerable, despite the nation's growing food insecurity problem

by Kim Krisberg Hunger in America can be hard to see. It doesn't look like the image of hunger we usually see on our TVs: the wrenching impoverishment and emaciation. Talking about American hunger is hard because, well, there's food all around us. Everywhere you look, there's food — people eating food, people selling food, people advertising food, people wasting food, people dying of eating too much food. The obesity epidemic alone is getting so big that it's slowly swallowing the health care system in billions of dollars of care. We have a food problem. But food cost money. So for some…

Comments of the Week #23: From spin to higher dimensions

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity." -Rod Serling It's been an action-packed week here on Starts With A Bang, and we've tackled a whole slew of topics you're unlikely to see anyplace else! The past week has seen us take a look at the following: Where does cosmic rotation come from? (for Ask Ethan), Cartoons for social justice (for our Weekend Diversion), The most curious object of all, M24 (for Messier Monday), The man who invented the 26th dimension (a stellar contribution from Paul Halpern), How to…

Stem cell therapy for "locked-in" syndrome?

About four months ago, the skeptical blogosphere was abuzz about a tragic story. The story was that of a Belgian man named Rom Houben, who had been unfortunate enough to have been in a motor vehicle collision and suffered serious brain injury. That brain injury left him in a comatose state, which had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state. What brought him worldwide prominence was a claim by neurologist Steven Laureys that he was not in a persistent vegetative state at all, but was rather fully conscious and "locked in," meaning that he could see, hear, and feel everything but could…

Yes, millions of years!

That Answers in Genesis crackpot, Terry Mortenson, is speaking on "Millions of Years" at the Creation "Museum". Those of us who visited that circus of charlatanry know that this is one of their obsessions — the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old is one of the wrecking balls atheists use to destroy faith. He's right, of course. It's a very useful tool. When fundamentalists tie their faith absolutely to a claim that is easily refuted, that contradicts the evidence, and that requires them to constantly escalate their denial and delusions in order to sustain their belief, it makes…

QIP 2009 Day 4 Liveblogging

Sorry to those who talked in the afternoon yesterday: I ran off to listen to Michael Nielsen talk at the Santa Fe Institute. Charles Marcus, "Holding quantum information in electron spins" Charlie gave a talk about the state of quantum computing in solid state quantum dot systems. Things Charlie talked about: T1 times of single electron spins of 1 second from Mark Kastner's group: arXiv:0707.1656. Those are long, and it would be awesome to have those for real working devices! Delft's work on single electron spin manipulations: "Driven coherent oscillations of a single electron spin in a…

A Dog and the Mind of Newton

It's bad enough to see basic scientific misinformation about evolution getting tossed around these days. USA Today apparently has no qualms about publishing an op-ed by a state senator from Utah (who wants to have students be taught about something called "divine design") claiming there is no empirical evidence in the fossil evidence that humans evolved from apes. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with the twenty or so species of hominids that existed over the past six million years. Perhaps just file them away under "divine false starts." But history takes a hit as well as science.…

Conventional medicine, 'alternative' treatments, and the ethics of research with humans.

A little while ago, PalMD put up a post at Whitecoat Underground about the current state of the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), especially at a moment in history when the federal government is spending loads of money (and thus maybe should be on the lookout for expenditures that might not be necessary) and when health care reform might actually happen. Pal wrote: The whole idea of setting up such an agency is a bit quixotic---after all, the National Institutes of Health already study health science. .... Many, many studies have been funded which fail basic…

"All truth comes from public debate": A corollary to crank magnetism

A long, long time ago in a ScienceBlogs far, far away (well, it seems that way anyway, given the halcyon times back then before Pepsigate), Mark Hoofnagle coined the term "crank magnetism." It was a fantastic term used to describe how susceptibility to one form of quackery, pseudoscience, or just plain crankery tended to be associated with other forms of quackery, pseudoscience, or crankery. It explains why so many creationists tend to be into quackery and/or antivaccinationism, why so many 9/11 Truthers also tend to flirt with Holocaust denial or anthropogenic global warming denialists go…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Iron Rule of German New Medicine

No, I'm not talking about "Iron Justice," a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the future. This time, it's something different. This week, as every week since inaugurating Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was sitting back, contemplating what flavor of woo I should have a little fun with. As is often the case, it was hard. No, it wasn't hard because of lack…

Wikileaks Mythbusting: Yemen Cables

There has been much talk about whether the recent Wikileaks leak of diplomatic cables will be a good thing or a bad thing. I would assume (and that is an assumption ... which is why I used the word assume) that there would be some of both, some forward movement of progressive ideals including honest government and reasonably transparent diplomatic policies that value human rights and the environment, etc., and some damage to ongoing diplomatic processes or exposure of ammunition that can be used for nefarious purposes by nefarious figures and organizations. But, since some of that would…

Natural selection of a human gene: FUT2

A few months ago I reviewed a paper which examined the various complexities of interpreting signals of natural selection from recently developed genomic tests in response to the avalanche of human sequence data. In the paper, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations, the authors state: We find that putatively selected haplotypes tend to be shared among geographically close populations. In principle, this could be due to issues of statistical power: broad geographical groupings share a demographic history and thus have similar power profiles. However,…

Religulous opens tonight

And it's not showing anywhere near me. In fact, I will be very surprised if it opens anywhere in this rural, religious area…I'll probably have to wait for it to come out on DVD. Religulous is the new movie by Bill Maher, an agnostic who thinks religion is a "load of nonsense", which by all reports is going to mock religion mercilessly — if this hysterical review by a devout fundamentalist is any indication, it's going to be great. Maher, though, isn't exactly an unblemished source with a deep dedication to reason, since he's fallen for some embarrassingly silly altie medicine nonsense before…

Still more BPA sleaze from FDA

Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and their colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The draft report says BPA is…

$ETI and the steps to exolife

"Name one thing robots can't do in space that humans can!" was the challenge from a speaker at a meeting I attended many years ago. "Have babies!" was the loud and prompt reply from a grad student friend of mine at the back, thereby winning the argument to great applause. It is important to remember that while science and discovery is important, it is not the ontological basis for space exploration. Space is, ultimately, about existential motivations. The science helps drive the motivation, and provides the information that enables space exploration, but is in many important ways not the…

Public Health Hardball: More Lessons from California

By David Michaels Labor health advocates in California are supporting legislation banning diacetyl, the flavoring chemical implicated in numerous cases of bronchiolitis obliterans, a debilitating lung disease, among workers in the food industry. The ban may never occur, but by demanding it we are getting closer to protecting workers and the public from this very toxic material. The threat of a ban has forced the food industry into an unusual position - industry representatives are now praising the California OSHA program, which is also moving to issue regulations limiting exposure to the…

No matter what mining industry reps say, MSHA's proposed rule to address black lung is easily achievable

Thanks to Ken Ward at Coal Tatto for alerting me to a hearing conducted last week in the House Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Overight and Government Spending, of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called "EPA's Appalachian Energy Permitorium: Job Killer or Job Creator?" The majoirity of the witnesses were at the ready to sing the praises of King Coal and complain that the Obama Administration is trying to cripple the industry. The target of the oversight hearing was the EPA, with Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) serving as lead-off witness and insisting…

The Mythical Republican Climate Pivot

Every now and then, I hear someone giving the Republican Party credit for finally starting to get on board with 20th (or even 19th) century science, and 21st century eyeballs, to accept the idea of climate change. That is annoying whenever it happens because it simply isn't ever true and never will be. Media Matters for America has a piece critiquing a recent Politico assertion that the tide is turning. Here is some of what they say, click through to the rest. ... Politico's story...offers two main examples to support its argument: First, the bipartisan House Climate Solutions Caucus "has…

A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books

Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I've got some info on this book as well as a few others for the budding emacs enthusiasts. Land of Lisp teaches the lisp programming language using the development of games as a focal point. Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, and occurs in numerous dialects. The standard form that is taught in Land of Lisp is Common Lisp. The teaching style in…

AP Misreports Haiyan as Category 4

While reading an AP attributed article on Huffington post about Super Typhoon Haiyan (also known as Yolanda), I did a double take at this paragraph: Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 235 kilometers per hour (147 miles per hour), with gusts of 275 kph (170 mph), when it made landfall. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., and nearly in the top category, a 5. Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same thing. They are just called different names in different parts of the world. It struck me because "nearly in the…

Maryland's Anti-Gay Governor

Via Jason Kuznicki, a story I missed: the governor of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, has vetoed a bill that would have given gay couples the legal right to be treated as a relative in medical situations. As the Washington Post reports: Modeled after laws in California, Hawaii and other states, the legislation would have granted nearly a dozen rights to unmarried partners who register with the state. Among those: the right to be treated as an immediate family member during hospital visits, to make health care decisions for incapacitated partners and to have private visits in nursing homes. And as…

Pagel on Darwin

Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question: How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems,…

Wyckoff's testimony on behalf of higher ed

It's that time when universities get on their knees and beg the state for continuing support (hey, isn't that all the time?), and my colleague Pete Wyckoff gave some testimony at the Minnesota capitol the other day. It's good stuff that summarizes the financial dilemma students are facing everywhere as tuition climbs and the government cuts back. Testimony for the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee, 1/31/07 My name is Pete Wyckoff and I am an associate professor of biology. I represent the University of Minnesota, Morris, a special campus that seeks to replicate the…

Capitalism v. conservation

What with all the enthusiasm about the energy legislation now working its way through the U.S. Congress, it's easy to forget there is a fundamental contradiction between the goals of conservationists and those of the utilities involved in supplying the energy. And this inconvenient contradiction, between capitalism and conservation, is not easily resolved. A case in point is an ongoing marketing campaign by one of America's largest utilities, Duke Energy. Duke just happens to be the supplier of the electricity that powers my family's ultra-efficient heat pump, compact fluorescent light bulbs…

Teaching scientific knowledge doesn't improve scientific reasoning

On Tuesday, I wrote a short essay on the rightful place of science in our society. As part of it, I argued that scientific knowledge is distinct from the scientific method - the latter gives people the tools with which to acquire the former. I also briefly argued that modern science education (at least in the UK) focuses too much on the knowledge and too little on the method. It is so blindsided by checklists of facts that it fails to instil the inquisitiveness, scepticism, critical thinking and respect for evidence that good science entails. Simply inhaling pieces of information won't get…

Canada's tar sands conundrum

One of Canada's best journalists, Andrew Nikiforuk, is the author of a just-released report on Canada's tar sands from Greenpeace. "Dirty Oil: How the tar sands are fueling the global climate crisis" is not a peer-reviewed paper, it was commissioned by environmental activists, and it relies heavily on other non-peer-reviewed reports by non-objective organizations. Despite all that, it's still a solid, reliable read that every Canadian and American with an interest in energy policy should download promptly. There isn't a lot new in the report for anyone who's been following the massive…

An Everything But Merger Act?

I have been riveted by yesterday's re-argument of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission before the United States Supreme Court. I mean who hasn't? At stake, as they say in media newspeak, is the entire state of campaign finance law (the astute reader will note the choice of words in this sentence and smile.) The Quantum Pontiff is not a lawyer, but he is the son of a lawyer, and greatly admires the ability of supreme court justices to herd the truth in directions more palatable to their preexisting exquisite judicial tastes (why is everyone staring at Justice Scalia?) So I would…

"Millions and Millions Dead"

I hadn't seen this Onion report before -- "Millions and Millions Dead" -- from a decade ago, although I have referred to this report -- "World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 percent" -- before (in an old post). I am thus forced to repost the graphic about world death rates, but to pair it with the article about millions dead. They do make a good combo. "Millions and Millions Dead" June 2, 1999 | Issue 35â¢21 As the body count continues to rise, a shaken nation is struggling to cope in the wake of the mass deaths sweeping the world population. With no concrete figures available at…

Foreign-Born TAs and Undergraduate Performance

This is a bit old, but in case you haven't seen it... A few weeks ago, Jake wrote a post about the importance of teaching during grad school. I couldn't agree more--some of my best experiences in grad school to date have been in front of a classroom of keen undergrads, their young minds yearning to be filled with the minutiae of microeconomic theory (or so I have convinced myself). I find it absolutely true that having to teach a concept cements it in my mind, and it is my fervent hope that a few of my students will at least consider becoming economists. There is also, of course, the…

Is the whole "More Guns, Less Crime" debate a waste of time?

In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote: First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it's true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned. In an attempt to set him straight, I emailed him and pointed out that Lott's studies had been refuted by better and more extensive work by Ayres and Donohue and gave him a link to my comments on Lott. Instead of responding to any of the points I made, he replied: You sound like a gun-hater. I wrote back…

Ozone revisionism

Matthew Nisbet's contrarian "Climate Shift" report has been rightly criticised for claiming that green groups outspent opponents of climate action, that the era of false balance in the media was over and for his own falsely balanced coverage. Ted Parson, who wrote the book on protecting the ozone layer corrects another false statement from Nisbet, who wrote: According to climate scientist Mike Hulme and policy expert Roger Pielke Jr., climate change remains misdiagnosed as a conventional pollution problem akin to ozone depletion or acid rain-- environmental threats that were limited in scope…

Finding Atlanta, Part 1

As you may have already guessed, things are beginning to normalize. We just finished moving in the rest of the furniture to our new place this past weekend, a cute little house in Midtown Atlanta. From our street you can see downtown, which is beautiful at night. Apparently, the previous owner's name was Hattie, who was a prominent member of one of the local Baptist churches (in the basement, our landlord found a plaque of some kind given to Hattie in honor of her service to the church). Hattie's old deep freeze, dryer and Frigidaire stove still work perfectly (and go perfectly with our…

How To Use Linux ~ 01 Introduction

This is the first of a series of posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions. Slowly and easily. Some of the posts in this series may end up being useful references, so consider bookmarking those. At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that will matter to you, Linux is very different from the others. The most important difference, which causes both the really good things and the annoying things to be true, is that Linux and most of the software that you will run on…

Pagel on Darwin

Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question: a repost How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems…

Vaccines and infant mortality rates

The anti-vaccine movement is a frequent topic on this blog, sometimes to the point where it seems to take over the blog for days (or even weeks) at a time and I cry for respite. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that the anti-vaccine movement is one of the most dangerous forms of pseudoscience, a form of quackery that, unlike most forms of quackery, endangers those who do not partake of it by breaking down herd immunity and paving the way for the resurgence of previously vanquished diseases. However, anti-vaccine beliefs share many other aspects with other…

Medical marijuana and the new herbalism, part 2: The cult of "cannabis cures cancer"

About five weeks ago a month ago, I finally wrote the post I had been promising to write for months before about medical marijuana. At the time, I also promised that there would be follow-up posts. Like Dug the Dog seeing a squirrel, I kept running into other topics that kept me from revisiting the topic. However, recently the New York Times gave me just the little nudge I needed to come back and revisit the topic, first by openly advocating the legalization of marijuana, then by vastly overstating the potential medical benefits of pot (compare the NYT coverage with my post from last month…