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Humans not yet Perfect? There must be a god involved!

First, a quick status note: the blog has been really slow lately because I fell behind schedule on my book, and I've been putting all of my free time into catching up. I'm finally pretty much caught up, so I should have time to get back to the Chaos theory posts. I need a few days of study time to get myself back up to speed, and then some actual good contentful posts should start showing up. In the meantime, for your entertainment, I've been looking at a really silly website that was sent to me by a reader with entirely too much free time on his hands. It's another one of those supposed…

Roman Numerals and Arithmetic

. I'm away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I'm not likely to have time to write while I'm away, I'm taking the opportunity to re-run an old classic series of posts on numbers, which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly revised. I've always been perplexed by roman numerals. First of all, they're just weird. Why would anyone come up with something so strange as a way of writing numbers? And second, given that they're so damned weird, hard to read, hard to work with, why do we still use them for so many things today? The Roman Numeral…

Encryption, Privacy, and You

As you've probably heard, the US customs service has, recently, asserted the right to confiscate any and all computers and/or digital storage carried by anyone crossing the US border. They further assert the right to demand all passwords, encryption keys, etc., from the owners. They even further assert the right to keep or make copies of any data that they find, and to share it without limit with anyone they choose. I don't think I really need to stress how insane this is. Back when I worked for IBM, I frequently travelled to Canada, because I worked with development labs in Toronto and…

Coturnix on Sex, part II - The Hooters Conundrum

My second guest-blogging post on Echidne Of The Snakes, about the potential to have Hooters fund some breast cancer research. Purposefully written to provoke. Cross-posted under the fold... Abel PharmBoy of Terra Sigillata asked: Can Hooters support the fight against breast cancer all without being perceived as capitalistic, misogynistic, or otherwise demeaning to women? You need to read his whole post to see the context, i.e., exactly what kind of sponsorhip for exactly what kind of breast-cancer research. Definitely something that could be, if done carefully, be done in good taste, with…

Clock Tutorial #16: Photoperiodism - Models and Experimental Approaches

This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory. Timely prediction of seasonal periods of weather conditions, food availability or predator activity is crucial for survival of many species. Although not the only parameter, the changing length of the photoperiod ('daylength') is the most predictive environmental cue for the seasonal timing of physiology and behavior, most notably for timing of migration, hibernation and reproduction. While rising spring temperatures may vary from year to year,…

“You shouldn’t have to win the boss lottery”: The White House Summit on Working Families

Last week’s White House Summit on Working Families – hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Department of Labor, and the Center for American Progress – served both as a pitch to employers to adopt more family-friendly policies, and as a push for policies that require all employers to evolve for 21st-century realities. Wages, paid leave, flexibility, and caregiving were major topics in the day-long event, and speaker after speaker returned to the same themes. I was honored to attend the event, and left it feeling hopeful that we’ll keep seeing improvements in workplace…

Moving On

Thursday was Eli's end of school graduation - and I thought in honor I'd re-run a post I wrote at ye olde blogge back in 2009. One of the hardest parts of addressing our changing world is dealing with shifting expectations and assumptions, and not getting mired down in sadness or anger. I think one of the things that has helped me is that we've had to do this in other ways before. This year is Eli's last one at the nurturing school for kids with autism that he's attended since kindergarten, and I found myself thinking about this a lot this week. There are, of course, plenty of moments in…

Swine flu: prepping for tough times

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure We've been talking about the possibility of a flu pandemic here for four and a half years. The cliché during much of that time was that the right way to think of a flu pandemic was not "if," but "when." As long as no pandemic materialized, however, there was great scope for what it would look like and hence what to plan for. The hoary adage, "Hope for the best, plan for the worst" made sense but left a great deal of scope for different approaches to planning. What, after all, was the worst we could expect? We had two models, one historical, one…

Oh, to be a so-called 'transitional anuran'

So here we are: anuran diversity part II - you have to have read part I (here) for the following to make proper sense. Yesterday I showed my video of Tiger the secretary bird (filmed at the International Bird of Prey Centre, Gloucestershire, last week) to anybody that would watch, and in the wee small hours I even completed the first draft of a paper on yet another new Wealden theropod (as always, more on that in due time). I remain perpetually busy with those pesky ichthyosaurs. Oh yeah, and happy wedding anniversary me and Tone (yes, we got married on Halloween. Don't ask). Anyway, anurans…

Basics: Logic, aka "It's illogical to call Mr. Spock logical"

This is another great basics topic, and it's also one of my pet peeves. In general, I'm a big science fiction fan, and I grew up in a house where every saturday at 6pm, we all gathered in front of the TV to watch Star Trek. But one thing which Star Trek contributed to our vocabulary, for which I will never forgive Gene Rodenberry, is "Logic". As in, Mr. Spock saying "But that would not be logical.". The reason that this bugs me so much is because it's taught a huge number of people that "logical" means the same thing as "reasonable". Almost every time I hear anyone say that something is…

Clock Tutorial #16: Photoperiodism - Models and Experimental Approaches

This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory. Timely prediction of seasonal periods of weather conditions, food availability or predator activity is crucial for survival of many species. Although not the only parameter, the changing length of the photoperiod ('daylength') is the most predictive environmental cue for the seasonal timing of physiology and behavior, most notably for timing of migration, hibernation and reproduction. While rising spring temperatures may vary from year to year,…

Clock Tutorial #16: Photoperiodism - Models and Experimental Approaches

This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory. Timely prediction of seasonal periods of weather conditions, food availability or predator activity is crucial for survival of many species. Although not the only parameter, the changing length of the photoperiod ('daylength') is the most predictive environmental cue for the seasonal timing of physiology and behavior, most notably for timing of migration, hibernation and reproduction. While rising spring temperatures may vary from year to year,…

Clock Tutorial #16: Photoperiodism - Models and Experimental Approaches

This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory. Timely prediction of seasonal periods of weather conditions, food availability or predator activity is crucial for survival of many species. Although not the only parameter, the changing length of the photoperiod ('daylength') is the most predictive environmental cue for the seasonal timing of physiology and behavior, most notably for timing of migration, hibernation and reproduction. While rising spring temperatures may vary from year to year,…

mturner turns his molasses-thick wit on me

A reader who has been stymied by TypeKey (I wish I could fix that bug) informs me that mturner, one of the creationists at the ARN message board, thinks he has rebutted my post on whale limb evolution, claiming that Thewissen et al. have actually found evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. It's fairly typical nonsense from the ARNies, but it's so amusing I had to rebut his rebuttal. ARN is a weird place. There are several patient, intelligent people working it to correct the babble that the flaming idiots who dominate the board put up. I am not that patient, so I can't stomach the…

Ask Ethan #1: Back-to-school advice

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught." -Oscar Wilde As many of you know, last weekend I launched a suggestion box here on the site, and I've been overwhelmed by the response: about fifty of you have sent something in to me in the first less-than-a-week of this alone! Image credit: Thao Nelson of http://mycredo.wordpress.com/. So, let's start answering them! There are more than enough excellent questions and suggestions to keep me busy for a long time, but with the new academic year starting up, one of them…

Do genes make you gay?

Of course they do. To the extent that genes make you anything in particular, though the role of genetics in human behavior is pretty limited. You've probably heard about the newly reported research in which a genetic link was found to homosexuality in a study of gay brothers. Kelly Servick has a good writeup on it here. The study looked at 409 pairs of gay brothers, and found a region on the X chromosome that was similar across the sample. This sort of shotgun approach, comparing a trait (in this case, gayness) with a bunch of DNA (I oversimplify) is very likely to get results that look real…

Books On Birds And Nature

Here we look mainly at bird books, but I wanted to also mention a couple of other items on non-birds. I've mixed in some new books along with a few other books that have come out over the last couple of years, but that are still very current, very amazing books, and since they have been out for a while, may in some cases be picked up used or otherwise less expensively. Let's start with the least-bird like book, one that will be a must have for anyone traveling to or studying Africa. This is The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals: Second edition. This is a newly produced edition of this…

Like the tree that stands beside the water ...

We shall not be moved. ..." Fifty five of us jammed in a bus designed to hold fourty people plus a driver, rolling down Highway 90 from Upstate New York to Chicago. As a teenager (just turned 15), I was thrilled to be going to Chicago to attend the Fight Back Conference, a thinly disguised Communist Party meeting. I was going, in part for Keith, the young African American kid (about 12 years old) who was shot in the back by a state trooper just under a year earlier. Keith was driving a mo-ped down the toll road, on the shoulder, where he shouldn't have been. It appears that he did not…

Idiot of the Week? Or Liar of the Week?

Today's target is one Robert Meyer, who wrote this train wreck of an article, Were We Fooled by Stephen J. Gould ? on a site called intellectualconservative.com. If this article represents what they consider to be intellectual, it's time to redefine the term. It's one of those extraordinarily common articles where someone who clearly knows nothing whatsoever about evolutionary theory nonetheless feels qualified to spout off about it, combining smugness with ignorance along the way. In it, Meyer goes for the two oldest and most often refuted lies about Gould. They were in fact refuted by Gould…

Communication Skills for Scientists

As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point to the next time I get asked. So, what communications skills should scientists have? The answer depends on what kind of science you're going to do, and what you want to do with it. First and foremost, though: If you want to be a successful scientist, you need good communications skills. Full stop.…

Coyne vs. Nelson

Jerry Coyne has an interesting post up reporting on an e-mail he received from Paul Nelson. Nelson is a prominent young-Earth creationist, though he also circulates freely among the ID folks. Nelson, annoyed by Coyne's emphasis on the importance of natural selection in evolution, sent Coyne an e-mail, part of which I now reproduce: Skepticism about the efficacy of natural selection is widespread within evolutionary biology (see below). Jim Shapiro is hardly alone in this regard. So when you tell your WEIT audience that natural selection is the only game in town for building complex…

New Atheists vs. Evolutionary Religious Studies?

Remember that scene in Die Hard, where Bruce Willis drops a huge pile of explosives down an elevator shaft, blowing up the lobby of the building and killing a few terrorists, but also shattering the building's huge glass windows? You might recall that right after he does that the officious deputy police chief says to him, angrily, “I got a hundred people down here and they're all covered in glass!” And Bruce Willis replies, “Glass? Who gives a sh*t about glass?” I was reminded of that scene upon reading this article, by Tom Bartlett, in the current issue of The Chronicle Review. Here's…

Monday Math: A Rant About Jargon

Jerry Coyne calls our attention to this abstract, from a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney move in dimension 4 by constructing higher-order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on immersed disks in the 4-ball, we identify some of these new invariants with previously known link invariants such as Milnor, Sato-Levine, and Arf invariants. We also define higher-order Sato-Levine and Arf invariants and show that these…

Is Bitcoin Currently Experiencing a Selfish Miner Attack?

Probably not. All right, now that you know my conclusion, let's see how to get there with data. First, some background. Let me give very quick overview of Bitcoin in this context. (There are many comprehensive overviews elsewhere.) Bitcoin is an ongoing ledger of transactions of along the lines of "This guy had 5 Bitcoins, and he sent 2 of them to that guy. Now he has 3 Bitcoins." The transaction ledger is public, which prevents people from sending coins they already sent - the ledger rejects invalid transactions. Everyone on the network has a copy of the ledger. New transactions are appended…

Bill Nye and abortion

Bill Nye talks about the realities of reproduction, and the right wing completely loses its shit. It is not Nye at his most eloquent, but…he's actually right about everything important. Read this title for an example of the inanity of far right responses, titled WATCH: Bill Nye, Science Guy Makes An Idiot Of Himself On Reproduction. Nye is clearer and more correct than whoever wrote that, making it particularly amusing. It makes a lot of claims. Not that this writer had all that great an affinity for Bill Nye anyway, but the video below has to be the most smug, snide, atheistic diatribe…

Testosterone Levels In Carcharhinus leucas: Is It All Bull?

So, Shark Diver set out a challenge for Ocean of Pseudoscience Week that I simply had to look into. He wanted to know whether there's any science backing the notion that Bull Sharks, Carcharhinus leucas, have extraordinarily high testosterone levels and might thus be usable as a source for legally obtainable steroids - an idea, apparently, started by some video game. The rumor, as I'd heard it, is that the fierce attitudes of these large and aggressive sharks is due to unfathomably high circulating levels of testosterone. Specifically, these menacing monsters supposedly have higher serum…

Evolution and truth

Repost from the old blog: One of the problems in having a philosophy related blog is that ideas are hard things to generate on demand, so often you need someone to raise the problems for you to think about. Being naturally (and preternaturally!) lazy, I don't go out looking for problems (of a philosophical nature; the ordinary kind seem to find me like flies find rotting garbage). Hence, this blog is sporadic. Well, I just tripped over an interesting question raised by Certain Doubts: can we reconcile the Platonic value of truth with an evolutionary view of epistemology? That is, if we think…

Philosophy is to science, as ornithologists are to birds: 2. Two topics of philosophy of science

Philosophy of science deals largely with two general topics: Metaphysics and Epistemology. These are general topics of philosophy, and in the philosophy of science they deal only with the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So there are no overarching debates about how you can tell if you're dreaming, or whether we are all brains in a matrix-style vat. But there are local issues, as it were, that reflect these general concerns of philosophers. [Part 1, Part 3] Metaphysics covers many things Metaphysics is a hard field to define. It is named after the book of Aristotle, which…

Test of Faith: Of False Alternatives and Straw Men

Not long after I wrote about how creationists got paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine to appear in the anti-evolution film Darwin's Dilemma I received a message from someone at the Faraday Institute. Conway Morris had done an interview with them about science and religion for a miniseries called Test of Faith, they said; would I be interested in receiving a copy of the DVD? I said "Sure" and the film came in the mail last week. I cannot say I was very impressed. For those who have not heard of it before, the Faraday Institute is a John Templeton Foundation-funded group…

We need a sociologist of science…or a philosopher

There's another paper out debunking the ENCODE consortium's absurd interpretation of their data. ENCODE, you may recall, published a rather controversial paper in which they claimed to have found that 80% of the human genome was 'functional' — for an extraordinarily loose definition of function — and further revealed that several of the project leaders were working with the peculiar assumption that 100% must be functional. It was a godawful mess, and compromised the value of a huge investment in big science. Now W. Ford Doolittle has joined the ranks of many scientists who immediately leapt…

Another unpleasant discharge from the disreputable Terry Lectures

What is it with some English professors and their contempt for science? Some of the noisiest, most obnoxious, most self-indulgently prolix and goofy critics of the New Atheism are full-of-themselves pomposities like Eagleton and Fish, and now we can apparently add another, Marilynne Robinson. She's a novelist — I have not read any of her books, but they have received quite a bit of critical acclaim — and she recently gave a series of lectures, now published as a book, Absence of Mind, in which she is going to give the godless a piece of her mind. Unfortunately for her, it seems to be a small…

An aromatherapist versus science

Things are getting back to normal here at Casa Orac. it's always a come down after going to TAM and being able to mingle, argue, and party with people who share my skeptical world view. Yesterday was back to reality, though, at least as much as jet lag and sleep deprivation allowed. Fortunately, Monday is a lab day, and I don't have an scheduled patient care responsibilities, and now I'm pretty much back to normal. Even so, I can't do epics like yesterday's post every day even under the best circumstances; so today I'll take a look at a little wafer thin mint to cleanse the palate. I've…

In which Orac basks in the adoration of an antivaccine fan...

I'm sometimes asked why I do this. Why, people ask me, do I spend so much time generating post after post after post day after day after day? Obviously, one reason is that it interests me. Another reason is the passion that drives me to support science and science-based medicine and to detest the damage the pseudoscience, particularly pseudoscience in medicine, can do. There is, however, at least one more reason. I'm referring, of course, to the adoration of my "fans." Yes, the more I'm attacked, the more I know I've been effective against the forces of irrationality and pseudoscience. When…

Update on California bill AB 2109: It moves on despite the antivaccine movement

It just occurred to me that, even though there was news about it, I never mentioned what's happened recently with respect to California bill AB2109. As you might recall, I wrote about this bill about four weeks ago. In brief, this bill, if passed into law, would require that California parents seeking a "personal belief" exemption for vaccines to meet with a physician and have a physician sign off on what is more or less an informed consent form stating that the parents had been informed of the risks and benefits of vaccines and, more importantly for purposes of the personal belief exemption…

Germ theory denialism and the magical mystical microbiome

Whenever I point out that a very common thread of "thought"—if you can call it "thought"—in alternative medicine is nothing more than germ theory denialism, the usual reaction is incredulity. Newbies who haven't encountered quacks before invariably do a double take when I inform them that germ theory denialism is a thing, particularly among antivaccine activists. (After all, vaccines don't make sense if microorganisms don't cause disease.) Yet, time and time again I find examples of quacks who deny that disease is a consequence of infection. In fact, some go so far as to try to argue in the…

Yet another antivaccine rally, yet another yawn

If there's one thing that's amusing about the antivaccine movement, it's the disconnect between its members' perception of their own importance and the reality of it, which is that they tend to be a pretty pathetic, risible band. They post their blogs, full of the rage of Dunning-Kruger, thinking that they are putting forth the most sophisticated scientific arguments that real scientists, who have spent their entire professional life studying vaccines and autism, somehow missed and finding evidence of a link that no other scientist can. Of course, pesky things like rigorous study design tend…

Governor Jerry Brown protects patients by vetoing California's right-to-try bill

When last I discussed the cruel sham that is the tide of "right-to-try" laws that has been flowing through state legislatures to become law over the last year and a half. "Right-to-try" laws, as I pointed out when I first noted the earliest ones being promoted in Colorado, Louisiana, Arizona, and Missouri, referring to them as Dallas Buyers Club bills based on their seeming inspiration from that movie and pointing out how they are very, very bad policy that, contrary to the claims of its proponents, are far more likely to harm patients than help them. In every state in which such bills have…

Dr. Lorraine Day's at it again

You may recall Dr. Lorraine Day, the former Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980's who, after developing breast cancer, became a consummate altie, selling various dubious "natural, alternative therapies for all diseases, including cancer and AIDS." Somewhere along the line, sadly, she also became a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I've had an interest in her conspiracy-mongering for a while now, because she's the perfect storm of two of my biggest interests: "alternative medicine" and Holocaust denial. I used to refer to her as purveying both…

More dubious moral reasoning from animal rights activists

Yesterday, I did a post about ethics in human experimentation. The reason I mention that is because in the comments, a commenter named Paul pointed out an editorial of the sort of variety that we frequently see whenever there is a revelation of misdeeds in human research and a response to that article that is far too mild for the level of idiocy in the editorial. The editorial was written by Justin Goodman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Appearing in the Sacramento Bee, Goodman's article makes a dubious and typical false analogy for an animal rights activist,…

Is there publication bias in animal studies?

Last month, in response to some truly despicable activities by animal rights zealots, I wrote a series of posts about how animal rights activists target even researchers' children and appear to fetishize violence. This simply continued a string of posts that I've done over the years, the longest (and, in my not-so-humble-opinion, the best) deconstructs a lot of the bad scientific arguments used by animal rights activists to claim that animal research is useless, or nearly so, as well as other arguments made by extremists. One of the key points emphasized in these responses is that, regardless…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The sacred science of universal vibratory woo

I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration. I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon. I…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: A dead physicist rolls over in his grave--again

Pity poor Nikola Tesla. Again. It looks as though the woomeisters have found a way to abuse him yet again. I don't know what it is about Tesla, but he seems to be a magnet for such woo. Well, actually, I sort of do. Tesla was definitely a character and was known for a variety of strange beliefs during his lifetime. I'm pretty sure, though, that he never came up with anything like the Tesla Purple Energy Shield, which was lovingly described in this very forum about seven months ago. I'm also pretty sure that he never came up with anything like the Body Regenerator Tesla Coil, which starts out…

One year later: Kirby tries to cover his posterior

Note: One year ago today, an autistic boy, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, died of a cardiac arrest while undergoing chelation therapy to try to "cure" his autism. Today, because I am on vacation, I have scheduled several of my old posts on the topic to appear.The investigation into his death is ongoing regarding whether to file criminal charges against the doctor, although it irritates the hell out of me that they are arguing over whether Tariq was given the "right" agent when in fact there is no "right" agent for chelation therapy for autism. The boy should never have been getting chelation to "…

Once more into the muck: Creationists and the evolution of antibiotic resistance

I'm not sure why, but it's been a while since I've delved into the cesspit of pseudoscience that is the Discovery Institute's propaganda organ, Evolution News & Views. Perhaps it was because I simply got tired of diving into the depths of stupid. Of course, that then begs the question of why I've been spending so much time diving into the Age of Autism website or the sophisticated-sounding yet ultimately vacuously pseudoscientific blather that is David Kirby. Trying to decide which is stupider, AoA or ENV, is rather like deciding whether it would be better to die of cancer or Lou Gehrig's…

Anatomy of a Monster

For those of us with even a passing knowledge of psychology, Virginia Shooter Seung Cho's plays read like a fictionalized retelling of DSM IV, the bible of psychiatric disorders. The characters exhibit signs of everything from paranoia, to pedophilia, to anti-social personality disorder, and psychopathy. Lucinda Roy, one of Cho's English professors was so alarmed by his writings that she referred him to counseling. Cho declined to go. Ms. Roy then contacted campus police. They did nothing. Distressed, Ms. Roy contacted university officials, who gave her two options: She could drop Cho from…

Mike Adams issues a challenge over vaccines to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and hilarity ensues

I'm sure that a lot of you, like me, are watching the rebooted version of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, with Neil deGrasse Tyson taking over the hosting duties originally handled so ably over 30 years ago by Carl Sagan. I definitely enjoyed the first episode and am looking forward to additional episodes. The only thing that annoys me is that Cosmos is on at the same time as The Walking Dead, but that's what DVRs were made for. The first episode, which is all I've seen thus far at this writing, was quite impressive, and the segment at the end in which Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the time he…

A rather clueless defense of CAM from across the pond

Acupuncture is quackery. This cannot be repeated often enough, and, in fact, over the last several months I've developed a tendency to start all my posts on acupuncture by making sure to remind everyone that it is quackery. The reasons are many-fold. For one thing, the concepts behind acupuncture are based on the claim that somehow, placing little needles into the body along various lines known as meridians, somehow "redirects" the flow of vital life "energy" to healing effect. Never mind that this energy, called "qi," has never been detected, measured, or characterized, nor have have "…

Alternative medicine: The bait and switch is working

For a long time, going back almost to the beginning of this blog eight and a half years ago, I've referred to the "bait and switch" of alternative medicine. What I mean by that is the manner in which advocates of alternative medicine—or, as they like to call it these days, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, more recently still, "integrative medicine"—co-opt perfectly science-based modalities like diet, nutrition, and exercise as being somehow "alternative." Alternatively, they woo-ify such science-based modalities and then claim them as CAM. Either way, they deceptively give…

Calling out false "balance" on vaccines and autism

Manufactroversy. It's wonderful, made-up word that describes a phenomenon so aptly, so brilliantly, that I like to use it all the time. Basically the word describes a manufactured controversy that is motivated by either extreme ideology (virtually always crank ideology) and/or profit that is intentionally stoked to create public confusion about a scientific issue that is not in dispute. Such efforts are often accompanied by conspiracy theories involving deception and polemic rhetoric (and sometimes fraud). There's also another term that is related to the word "manufactroversy," and that's "…

Repudiating scientism, rather than surrendering to it

When I heard that Steven Pinker had written a new piece decrying the accusations of scientism, I was anxious to read it. "Scientism" is a blunt instrument that gets swung in my direction often enough; I consider it entirely inappropriate in almost every case I hear it used. Here's the thing: when I say that there is no evidence for a god, that there's no sign that there is a single specific thing this imagined being has done, I am not unfairly asking people to adopt the protocols of science — I am expecting to judge by their own standards and expectations. They are praying to Jesus in the…