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Pots, people & seeds

There's a new paper in PLoS ONE, Craniometric Data Supports Demic Diffusion Model for the Spread of Agriculture into Europe. That's fine. There are two extreme models about how farming might have spread in Europe. One model suggests that farmers replaced non-farmers genetically. Another model posits that there was no discernible movement of population, but ideas flowed. Apes are not the only ones who can imitate and emulate after all. Peruvians did not move with the potato, so there are cases of the latter. But the genetic data (see links) seem to imply some non-trivial contribution (for…

India losing its groundwater

Americans know that the Ogallala Aquifer is important, and declining. This is much more of an issue in India, Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water: Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade - and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame. Here's a map of the population density of India by district: And now a map of the change in the levels of groundwater (red = decline, blue = increase): The original letter to Nature,…

The young are godless

The Inductivist had a post up bemoaning the cultural liberalism and secularity of today's youth at the same time that I suggested that the culture wars will continue. My reasoning was that polarization still exists, and in fact is greater among the youth than the older cohorts. On the other hand readers observed that the trend is toward more liberalism. One of the major changes over the past generation which has gone under the radar of the media is that rapid rise of disaffiliation. After the 20th century seemed to disprove a strong form of the secularization hypothesis, some began talking…

Levels of analysis of religion, Atran, Boyer & Wilson

A few weeks ago, Andrew Brown (author of The Darwin Wars) stated: I'm not sure that Boyer, Atran and Wilson regard their explanations as complementary. I have talked to all three of them about it. My feeling is that while all three of them understand that the explanations might be complementary, they prefer to believe that all the work is done by their preferred model. It's not clear to me how one could decide this point in principle. He refers to Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust), Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) and David S. Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral). Atran & Boyer are of very similar…

An Interview with Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math

This time around, we're talking to Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math. What's your name? Mark Chu-Carroll What do you do when you're not blogging? Chase my children around.... (I've got a 6 year-old girl and a 3 1/2 year-old boy.) Cook. Chase my children some more. Make bizarrely elaborate paper airplanes. Shout at my children. Play Irish music on the wooden flute. Work. Break up fights between my children. Work. Suzuki violin with my daughter (my son isn't big enough yet). Collapse from exhaustion. What is your blog called? Good Math/Bad Math What's up with that name? When I first…

"It's all about Aunt Millie"

"It's all about saving Aunt Millie" Bob Swanson Co-Founder of Genentech I just learned today that Jim DeKloe, who wrote this post as a guest author a few years ago is giving a webinar on May 11th on protein purification from industrial enzymes to cancer therapy. Jim's webinar, offered through Bio-Rad, has two sessions at 3 pm Eastern and 7 pm Eastern. Registration is free and you can register HERE. Jim is one of the most inspirational educators I know and he's the sort of person that reminds you why educating students about biotechnology careers is important. His moving story is one that…

I Like M&Ms

I am still sleepy from all that tryptophan in turkey meat and the Evolution wine, so I don't think I have the energy to write a big post now - I'll leave much of my thoughts on the matter for a post-weekend post reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion. But I have to chime in briefly by sending you to the relevant links and copying some of the comments I wrote on those comment threads. Brace yourself for a lot of reading as there are several posts and many comments on each of the posts. Sorry, the links are not neccessarly in order, but you'll get the gist of the argument anyway. Ed Brayton…

I, Coturnix (or, Why I Am An Atheist)

This is an early post of mine, written on February 11, 2005, a rare one in which I discuss my own lack of religion: I had major computer problems last week so didn't think I would have the time to write a blog entry of my own for the third installment of the Carnival Of The Godless (found here), so was going to post a link to an old post, but the title of one of the new Carnival entries, I, Bloginette, made me think that my blog also has a bird as symbol (a quail, not a magpie), and I also remembered how much I loved the old TV series "I, Claudius", and how wonderful it would sound if I…

Statistics, damn statistics and well kept secrets

Marilyn Mann pointed me to an interesting post by David Rind over at Evidence in Medicine (thanks!). It's a follow-on to an earlier post of his about the importance of plausibility in interpreting medical literature, a subject that deserves a post of its own. In fact the piece at issue, "HIV Vaccines, p values, and Proof," raises lots of interesting questions about different ways to view what we mean by probability (the nub of the frequentist/Bayesian debate), the difference between proof and evidence, the thorny and mental cramp produced by the question of multiple comparisons, and finally…

Context is Everything

"Context is everything. Breastfeeding is almost universally beneficial in infants, but in an elderly cardiac patient, it can be fatal." - Spider Robinson Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams' piece in the New York Times "The Myth of Sustainable Meat." McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are…

Things Fall Apart - Slowly

Actually, it isn't all that slow, because a decade ago, all of this would have been largely unthinkable. The problem is that we don't see the gradual decline and fall - we are only vaguely aware that some things aren't quite what they used to be, and our progressive narrative tells us that they will soon be much better. But the problem is that's not necessarily true - there's little evidence for it. Even the most optimistic economists (and I don't recommend the most optimistic economists ;-)) have to admit our long term economic problems are extremely pressing. Add in resource depletion…

From One Thing and Another, Nine Years Passed...

Nine years ago today we moved to our farm. We brought with us some boxes of stuff, some furniture, four cats, our then 15-month old son (Eli, now 10 and 5' tall), Simon, packed conveniently in my pregnant belly, and my Mom (who went home after a day or two of helping us with the little guy). I was 29, Eric was just about to turn 31, and we were about as unprepared for life on a farm as any two (or three) people could be. Eric had grown a garden once or twice with his Mom as a kid in various apartment buildings. I'd had balcony gardens all through college and grad school, and once a year,…

Department of Redundancy...Redundancy Department.

Before I take off for the weekend, I thought I'd leave you with another re-run on the very basic process of adapting to rapidly changing conditions. Today I'm starting another Adapting-In-Place Class, beginning with the basics of evaluating whether you have a future where you are, what your other choices are, and then triaging your situation. One of the most basic elements of triaging any system - whether the systems that power your house or the ones that help you keep your head together when the going gets tough, is identifying redundancies. Why redundant systems? Well, for the simple…

Transmission, pathogenicity, virulence and vaccines, part II

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure CDC wants us to get vaccinated for flu every year. Always for seasonal flu, and this year, if there is a vaccine available, for swine flu. They want us to get vaccinated because they think the vaccine works and they want to prevent people from getting influenza, always a dangerous and unpredictable disease, even if most of us usually escape with just a flesh wound. CDC backs up its recommendations by a quite a few scientific studies demonstrating the vaccine is effective, citing figures that the vaccine is 58% effective or 91% or effective or some…

Four bad arguments against evolution

Bryan Fischer claims that anyone is capable of defeating Darwin in 4 easy steps, all they have to do is remember his four "scientific" arguments. I've got an easier strategy for creationists: be really stupid, lie a lot, and ignore anything a scientist tells you. See? Only three steps, and none of them require any thought whatsoever. Besides, it's really what Fischer has done, too. The only thing new is that he has distilled creationist inanity down to four easily dismissed lies, and they actually are fairly representative of common creationist misconceptions. So here you go, Bryan Fischer's…

Why is it OK for the coal industry to break the law?

by Ken Ward, Jr.  (This item first appeared on Nieman Watchdog; posted with permission) Often after accidents like the one at Crandall Canyon, Utah, mine operators claim their mines had relatively few violations. Even if thatâs trueâand often it isnâtâârelatively fewâ just isnât good enough in a risky venture like coal mining.  As  I write this, the news out of Crandall Canyon, Utah, is not looking good. The Associated Press reports that a tiny microphone lowered deep into the earth early Friday picked up no evidence that six coal miners caught in cave-in four days ago were still alive. …

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Let's check all seven PLoS journals tonight.... As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Molecular Phylogenetics of the Genus Neoconocephalus (Orthoptera, Tettigoniidae) and the Evolution of Temperate Life Histories: The katydid genus Neoconocephalus (25+ species) has a prominent acoustic…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Today, four out of seven PLoS journals published new articles. Here's my pick of papers I find most interesting and/or bloggable. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Use of Herring Bait to Farm Lobsters in the Gulf of Maine: Ecologists, fisheries scientists, and coastal managers have…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

Yup, traveling, but still manged to take a quick look at what's new in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Novel Acoustic Technology for Studying Free-Ranging Shark Social Behaviour by Recording Individuals' Interactions: Group behaviours are widespread among fish but…

London Zoo, Part One

tags: London England, London Zoo, sciblog, zoological gardens, travel Entrance, London Zoo. Image: GrrlScientist, 2 September 2008 [larger view]. After a leisurely morning walk through part of London's Regents Park, Bob O'Hara and I then spent the rest of the day at the London Zoo. The London Zoo is quite proud of their environmentally-friendly facilities, and they have a sign near the main entrance that describes their water conservation project; Sign near zoo entrance describing the zoo's water conservation project. London Zoo. Image: GrrlScientist, 2 September 2008 [larger view…

My sister is not Death's Grim Reaper

She's a hospice nurse. When I tell people her occupation, I typically receive a response like this: "She must be a very special person. I could never work in a place where people go to die." Hospice is a "place," and equating hospice to death, are just two of the misperceptions that hospice care providers and proponents are constantly working to dispel. Providing correct information that hospice is a philosophy of care (not a place) takes on special importance in November because it is National Hospice and Palliative Care month. Data from 2010 indicates that more than 68% of hospice…

Robinson on Dawkins

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote this lengthy review of The God Delusion for Harpers Magazine. She was unimpressed. The review weighs in at 4599 words, but you'll find yourself almost a thousand words in before hitting anything substantive about Dawkins' book. Prior to that it's just a lot of snideness about how seriously Dawkins takes himself, about how he's preaching to the choir, and about what a crazed Darwinian fundamentalist he is. In this portion of the review, Robinson seems more interested in showing off how well she writes than in making actual points.…

Cold Fusion: Is it Possible? Is it Real?

"Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. ...because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here." -David Goodstein I'm going to tell you a story that starts back in 1770, before not only the…

With Global Warming, Will Cold Outbreaks Be Less Common?

Maybe, maybe not. There is a new paper that looks at what climate scientists call “synoptic midlatitude temperature variability” and the rest of us call “cold snaps” and “heat waves.” The term “synoptic” simply means over a reasonably large area like you might expect a cold snap or heat wave to be. Specifically, the paper (Physics of Changes in Synoptic Midlatitude Temperature Variability, by Tapio Schneider, Tobias Bischoff and Hanna Plotka, published in Journal of Climate) concludes that as human-caused greenhouse gas pollution increases, the frequency of cold snaps in the northern…

A Muslim Defense of ID

A couple weeks ago, in response to an article about the Miami police staging random "shows of force" at hotels and banks, surrounding the place with swat teams and forcing everyone to show ID to go in or out for no apparent reason, Radley Balko sarcastically commented that if the terrorists hate us for our freedom then clearly attempts to reduce our freedom amount to "appeasement." Oh, blessed irony. I thought of that while reading this article in the National Review by Mustafa Akyol, a Muslim creationist from Turkey, arguing, apparently in all seriousness, that America should embrace "…

Moderate Muslims

One of the things I find disturbing lately is how many Americans have lumped all Muslims together into one monolithic group labeled "terrorists". You hear a lot of tsk tsking over this from those of us who are inclined to try not to demonize an entire group based on the most extreme among them, but I think that masks an even more important point. Lumping all Muslims together as terrorists is not merely unfair to the vast majority of Muslims in the world, it also undermines what could be our most powerful tool in fighting terrorism in the Islamic world. The battle is not Islam vs The West. The…

Why Global Warming's Effects Will Be Worse Than You Were Thinking

The story of climate change has always been more of worst-case, or at least, worser-case scenarios developing and less about good news showing up out of nowhere and making us unexpectedly happy. A few decades ago, it became clear that the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere primarily as CO2 was going to cause a greenhouse effect (yes, dear reader, we've known this for looooong time ... the idea that this is a recent and still untested idea is a lie you've been fed so many times some of you may have begun to believe it). At that time climate scientists thought, reasonably, that…

Try standing at the edge of knowledge for a while. You'll like it.

Alternate titles for this post: "It turns out, it is a little like a priesthood." "Join us. Join us. Join us. Braaainzzzzz" "Imma gonna let you finish, but first I think you need to get your Wellies wet." ... [Modified repost] In a library, there is a spatial relationship between knowledge and books or journals, and there is a sense of completeness about it. I'm thinking in particular of the Tozzer library, one I spent a fair amount of time in. I would go to the basement of the library and the entire ancient world (this is an anthropology library) was arrayed in a set of shelves to the…

If Chernobyl is as bad as it gets, then GIVE ME MORE! The Annotated Version

With the current nuclear power plant kerfuffle1 in Japan, people are making comparisons with a TMI-Chernobyl scale, with TMI being a nuclear accident that is not bad at all2 and Chernobyl being the worst case scenario.3 This is actually very reassuring, because Chernobyl was really no big deal.4 The event itself killed dozens of workers and rescue personnel, but the number of people killed in nuclear power plant accidents in total, including Chernobyl and all the other active plant accidents ever, is still far lower in terms of energy produced by that method than the number of people killed…

New theory on Earth's Magnetic Field: Theory interesting, reporting botched

This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons. What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth's magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking. What is…

The Ontological Argument as a Test of Intellectual Seriousness

I'm currently reading Scott Aikin's and Robert Talisse's book Reasonable Atheism: A Moral Case for Respectful Disbelief. I'm finding it a strange experience. I agree with most of their substantive points, but I always find it off-putting when writers start boasting of their own civility and respectfulness. I had to smile, though, when I came to this: We take the Ontological Argument as the litmus test for intellectual seriousness, both for atheists and religious believers alike. Anyone who takes the question of God's existence seriously must grapple with this fascinating argument.…

Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers

On Twitter Sunday morning, the National Society of Black Physicsts account retweeted this: Using Lasers to Lock Down #Exoplanet Hunting #Space http://t.co/0TN4DDo7LF — ✨The Solar System✨ (@The_SolarSystem) September 28, 2014 I recognized the title as a likely reference to the use of optical frequency combs as calibration sources for spectrometry, which is awesome stuff. Unfortunately, the story at that link is less awesome than awful. It goes on at some length about the astronomy, then dispenses with the physics in two short paragraphs of joking references to scare-quoted jargon from the…

Quantum Erasure

When I posted congratulating the winner of this year's Nobel betting pool, I received a gentle reminder in email that I'm a Bad Person and still haven't done one of the posts I owe to the 2011 winners. Evan reminded me that he asked for something about the delayed-choice quantum eraser, so let's talk about that a bit, in the traditional Q&A format. So, what's a delayed choice quantum eraser do? It may or may not have rubbed out mistakes you made while writing, but you don't know until later when somebody else chooses to read it? Nothing physical gets erased. The delayed-choice quantum…

Science Is Hard?: "A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout"

There was a brief flurry of discussion yesterday kicked off by Matt Yglesias posting People Don't Major in Science—Because It's Hard, which more or less says what the title would lead you to believe (either title, since he's blogging for Slate where they like to give pages titles that don't match the post titles...). This was inspired by a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, the full text of which seems to be paywalled, sort of-- they emailed it to me at my work address for free. And since I could get it, I figured I should dig into it a bit to see what it really said. I'm not going…

Mooney on Dover

Chris Mooney has posted his latest salvo in his ongoing discussion with Jerry Coyne. Sadly, I think he has muffed it pretty badly. Coyne, of course, can take care of himself. I am inserting myself into this discussion simply because I think this is an important and interesting topic. So let's have a look. The trouble starts early in Mooney's post when he writes: I believe the central reason we have such massive problems with the teaching of evolution to be precisely this--millions of America believe, incorrectly, that they must give up their faith in order to learn about it or accept it.…

NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow answers some questions on the Monitoring the Future Survey

On December 14 (last week), the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released the findings on adolescent drug use and trends as determined from the 35th annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey (press release). The ambitious survey is conducted with NIDA funding* by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Sciences led currently by Dr. Lloyd Johnston. The larger survey began in 1975 with only high-school seniors and was expanded in 1991 to include 8th and 10th graders to improve the ability to measure changes as a population progresses through school. A very detailed white…

The Computer, the Universe, and John Wheeler

It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. "Spacetime Physics" it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn't been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I'd never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those…

Sound encoding in the rat: a lesson about sparse vs. dense encoding

How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to see, hear, touch, etc., yet your brain only has a finite number of neurons to encode them. How is this infinite diversity assimilated by a machine with finite components? To address this issue, I want to talk about Hromadka et al. publishing in the journal PLoS Biology. Hromadka et al. perform electrical recordings in the auditory cortex of unanesthetized rats. (The…

Ancient rules for Bilaterian development

Assuming that none of my readers are perfectly spherical, you all possess notable asymmetries—your top half is different from your bottom half, and your front or ventral half is different from you back or dorsal half. You left and right halves are probably superficially somewhat similar, but internally your organs are arranged in lopsided ways. Even so, the asymmetries are relatively specific: you aren't quite like that Volvox to the right, a ball of cells with specializations scattered randomly within. People predictably have heads on top, eyes in front, arms and legs in useful locations…

The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry

This post is part of a Nature Blog Focus on hallucinogenic drugs in medicine and mental health, inspired by a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper, The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders, by Franz Vollenweider & Michael Kometer. This article will be freely available, with registration, until September 23.  See the Table of Contents for more information on this Blog Focus, and read the other blog posts: Serotonin, Psychedelics and Depression (by Neuroskeptic) Ketamine for Depression: Yay or Neigh? (by The Neurocritic) Visions of a…

The Nature of Partisan Politics

Conservatives and liberals conflict over their basic views on human nature. As an evolutionary anthropologist and student of history, I'm always fascinated to learn what politically motivated figures have to say about human nature. It's one area of life where people require zero expertise but can still claim authority in. A case in point appears in Newsweek where Yuval Levin, Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that "Partisanship is Good" because it is based on conflicting assumptions about human nature. Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views…

Knowledge, belief, and what counts as good science: More thoughts on Marcus Ross.

Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I've dealt with before (and it's at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier. First, for the sake of argument, I want to set aside all questions of Marcus…

Deepak Chopra issues a hilarious "challenge" to James Randi over consciousness

Deepak Chopra isn't very happy right now. In fact, he appears downright pissed off right now, particularly at skeptics, so much so that he's issued a hilariously fatuous "challenge" to James Randi (a.k.a.) The Amazing Randi on You Tube entitled Deepak Chopra's One Million Dollar Challenge to Skeptics: Yes, apparently with The Amazing Meeting (a.k.a. TAM) less than four weeks away, Chopra is looking to stir the pot a little bit with his usual blend of Choprawoo about consciousness and mind-body dualism and how nasty skeptics can't accept the paranormal and the healing powre of "intent." It's…

The Texas Republican Party platform: Creationism, denialism, "health freedom," and "vaccine choice" all rolled up into one big antiscience ball

And now for something completely different. Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…

PAPupuncture? On the rebranding of regional anesthesia as acupuncture

Acupuncture has been a frequent topic on this blog because, of all the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities out there, it's arguably the one that most people accept as potentially having some validity. The rationale behind acupuncture is, as we have explained many times before, little different than the rationale behind any "energy healing" method (like reiki, for example) in that it claims to redirect the flow of "life energy" (the ever-invoked qi). The only difference is that acupuncturists claim to bring this therapeutic qi rearrangement about by sticking thin needles…

Removing science from anthropology: Parallels with medicine

It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll post two, one older, one more recent, but both about the same topic. Earlier today, I posted a rerun from 2007. This one's a bit newer, from 2010. Even so, if you haven't been reading at least a year it's…

A 50 minute infomercial for traditional Chinese medicine disguised as a radio show, courtesy of Colin McEnroe

When I wrote about YouYou Tu, the Chinese scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her successful identification, isolation, purification, and validation of Artemisinin, an antimalarial medication that was quite effective. It was also derived from an herbal remedy used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has led a fair number of TCM advocates to portray this Nobel Prize as a "validation" or "vindication" of TCM. It wasn't. Nor was it a validation of naturopathy or herbalism, as has been claimed. It was a validation of the good, old-fashioned science-based…

The return of the revenge of the "CDC whistleblower"

A couple of weeks ago, I first took note of a new conspiracy theory that's been brewing in the antivaccine crankosphere, namely the claim that big pharma has been systematically murdering alternative medical doctors, starting with autism quack Jeff Bradstreet, who committed suicide the day after the FDA raided his office. Of course, it didn't take long for various supporters of quackery to conclude that it was a hit job. Heck, just yesterday, Julie Wilson, a staff writer working for uber-crank Mike Adams, posted a whopper of a conspiracy theory in which Bradstreet and other alternative docs…

More on legalized quackery in Arizona

Yesterday, when I wrote about a death in Arizona caused by a homeopath doing liposuction, what amazed me the most was that homeopaths are licensed in Arizona. Although I alluded to it only briefly in yesterday's post, I was truly astounded at what homeopaths are allowed to do in Arizona. It piqued my curiosity--and horror. Consequently, I decided to delve a bit more deeply into the website of the Arizona Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners. There are more horrors in there than I thought. Those of you who live in Arizona should be afraid--very afraid!--about what these quacks are permitted…

The use of Poul Thorsen to distract from inconvenient facts about vaccine safety continues apace

AThe the nonsense from the anti-vaccine movement on the issue of Poul Thorenson, the Danish scientist indicted for defrauding the CDC of approximately $1 million in grant money continues apace... Just yesterday I pointed out how the anti-vaccine loons at Age of Autism were busily trying to poison the well over the Poul Thorsen case, as though whether or not he committed fraud with his CDC grant has anything to do with the quality of the science of the Danish studies that failed to find a link between either the MMR vaccine or thimerosal in vaccines and autism. Being on the mailing list of…