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Bugs in your berry juice

This is the first of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Riva Ben-Ezra. Acai fruit comes from the Brazilian Amazon forests and is one of the main dietary staples of the native population.  It has been touted as having potent antioxidant properties 1,2 as well as being a stimulant for weight loss3, a cancer cure and an anti-aging miracle drug.  Whether these claims are true or not remains to be seen4,5; however the FDA has clamped down on Acai products claiming to perform health benefits without classifying themselves as drugs (see here, here and here). Something that the FDA has not taken…

How intelligent dinosaurs conquered the world

Maybe it's because I write too much, but I am frequently surprised and sometimes a little freaked out at the strange coincidences that have so often cropped up during my time here at Tet Zoo. Long-time readers will recall the several occasions when we've looked at hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs: it started back in 2006 with my contention that ground hornbills (bucorvids) should be regarded as the dinosaurs most convergent with hominins (here). Humanoid dinosaurs like Dale Russell's hypothetical big-brained troodontid - the 'dinosauroid' - are (in my opinion) utterly unrealistic, relying…

Of short-heads, shovel-snouters and squeakers: an afrobatrachian's tale (part I)

Within the immense anuran clade termed Neobatrachia, we've so far gotten through the hyloids (see previous anuran article here: you'll need to read also the articles on basal anurans, transitional anurans, and ghost frogs and so on). All we have left is Ranoidea, but this is the biggest, most diverse, and most complex (and perhaps most interesting) anuran group. So here we go: we are at the beginning of the end... Ranoidea has always been understood to include ranids ('typical frogs') and all the anurans closer to them than to hyloids, and several derived characters of the skeleton and…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today and all nine are amazing and quite bloggable (hint, hint). As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: The Fastest Flights in Nature: High-Speed Spore Discharge Mechanisms among Fungi: A variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi. Those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include "squirt guns" that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota.…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 15 new articles 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: Parsing Social Network Survey Data from Hidden Populations Using Stochastic Context-Free Grammars: Human populations are structured by social networks, in which individuals tend to form relationships based…

Reaching creationists: here's the toolbox, do you know how to use the tools?

Over the last few days, I've been reading the articles in the latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. This is a fairly new journal with the mission stated in the title, and I have to say that it is very, very good — the articles are almost always easily readable, and they address significant issues in the public understanding of evolution. This particular issue focuses on transitions, and not just on transitional fossils, but all kinds of evidence for change over evolutionary time. It's been commented on by Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, and they're entirely right that these are…

Chronic pain patients caught in the middle of growing opioid abuse problem

by Kim Krisberg This is the first in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. The series will explore the science and policy of balancing the need for treatment as well as the need to prevent abuse and diversion. This week's story provides a look at the field of pain medicine and the patients it cares for; next week's story will look at the educational and risk reduction approaches physicians are employing to address opioid addiction and overdose. It took…

Glib Fortuna's Heroes

Glib has a post at STACLU where he admiringly cites two columns, one by Alan Sears of the ADF and one by Mike Adams. Both of those columns are loaded with ridiculous arguments. The column by Sears is one of the funniest ones you'll read this week, trust me. In attempting to establish the "fury of the Left toward Christians", he cites such influential thinkers as Rosie O'Donnell and Madonna. Because every young leftist I know of gets all their ideas from the material girl. But his conclusions, the ones quoted by good ol' Glib, are just plain silly: Somehow, the people at the wheel of our…

Judge Jones on Judicial Independence

The more I see from Judge John Jones, the man who presided over the Dover trial, the more I like him. He recently gave a speech to the ADL and they've put the transcript of that speech on their webpage. I urge you all to read it. He doesn't get into the specifics of defending his ruling, which judges generally avoid doing, but he does make a strong and more general argument about precedent and the job of a district judge that is aimed squarely at the critics of his decision. Those critics are so driven by their anger at not getting the outcome they wanted that they have blinded themselves to…

David Barton's Bad Legal Scholarship

Jon Rowe and I have made something of an avocation out of criticizing David Barton, the pseudo-scholar darling of the religious right who has peddled lie after lie about the founding fathers. But after reading this column by Barton, I now see that his historical ignorance is matched by his legal ignorance. First of all, it's absurd for him to call himself an historian. He has absolutely no credentials in the field. Yes, he writes about history, but that is irrelevant. I write about biology, but I don't call myself a biologist. I write abou the law, but don't call myself an attorney. This is…

Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change

A post about "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change" by Steve M. Easterbrook and Timbo "Not the Dark Lord" Johns (thanks Eli). For the sake of a pic to make things more interesting, here is one: It is their fig 2, except I've annotated it a bit. Can you tell where? Yes that's right, I added the red bits. I've circled vn4.5, as that was the version I mostly used (a big step up from vn4.0, which was horrible. Anecdote:it was portablised Cray Fortran, which had automatic arrays, but real fortran didn't. So there was an auto-generated C wrapper around each subroutine passed…

Messier Monday: The Top-Heavy Gumball Globular, M12

"A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle." -Khalil Gibran It’s time again for another Messier Monday! The Messier Catalogue was the original comprehensive and accurate catalogue of fixed, deep-sky objects visible to any dedicated (northern hemisphere) skywatcher with even the most primitive of astronomical equipment. Over the centuries, as our understanding of what we're looking at has improved, these 110 celestial wonders have provided classic examples of astronomical phenomena ranging from stellar corpses to new star-forming regions, from young…

Messier Monday: The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

"Upon one occasion, while engaged upon a seven-foot mirror, he did not remove his hands from it for 16 hours together." -from Caroline Herschel's obituary Welcome to another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we highlight a different one of the 110 deep-sky objects that Messier catalogued so that comet-hunters wouldn't confuse these permanent fixtures with transient comets. But each object has a unique, remarkable story in its own right. Image credit: The Messier Objects by Alistair Symon, from 2005-2009. Out of the 110 objects, a full forty of them are galaxies…

Sam Brownback, defender of the faith

Sam Brownback has an op-ed in the NY Times today, in which he explains with much straining at gnats why he was one of the Republicans who did not believe in evolution. Short summary: he reveals his own misconceptions about the biology, and mainly pounds the drum on how important Faith and Religion and God are. It will be persuasive to people who are already convinced that God is the most important thing in the universe, right down to what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, but it underscores my conviction that faith is the enemy, the source of many of our problems…such as the promotion…

AFA Lawyer's ID Nonsense

Brian Fahling, an attorney for the American Family Association, has written a highly dishonest propaganda piece for Agape Press about evolution and intelligent design. I know it's hardly sound sport to fisk these things, but someone's gotta do it. Like most religious right types, he freely combines old fashioned creationist tactics with ID. In particular, he goes for some quote mining that was debunked literally decades ago. The jumping off point is the situation at Kansas University, where a professor was planning a class on ID as mythology until some emails revealed his harshly anti-…

Humans accepting climate change vs. Jell-O: The Coastal Effect

There is an old theory in psychology that characterizes humans as a bowl of Jell-O (Jelly for some of you). Life pokes at the Jell-O, the Jell-O jiggles. Eventually the jiggles begin to change the Jell-O, so certain kinds of pokes result in certain kinds of responses. The Jell-O gurgles, babbles, notices things, learns, develops, and eventually becomes self aware. That is a great oversimplification of a theory that was, in turn, a great oversimplification of human development, yet it does seem to apply in many ways to human behavior. When it comes to climate change, people seem more…

How not to blog anonymously: Robert Marks

There was some talk on anonymous blogging on SciBlogs a while back. I wasnt here at the time, so Im going to pipe up now. I dont blog anon or with a pseudonym. Im Abbie Smith. I chose not to blog anon because if someone REALLY wanted to out me, it wouldnt be that hard, and 'Abbie Smith' is common enough it provides a slight buffer against stalkers. Some people have expressed concerns-- "Arent I worried someone will read my blog, not like me, and not hire me??" "What does your school think?" "What does your boss think??" If you are saying controversial things under a pseudonym, those are…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 90

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 89 Table of Contents Chapter 91 Chapter 90 Ecology 330 -- Extinction, July 7, 2060 I only had time for a few weeks of classes while I was back. The students were eager to hear of my exploits in the North and what I had learned about EF1. I related several tales and then brought them back to course content. "The subject of this lecture can be disturbing. When I first started to study the patterns of life on Earth, I several times found myself unnerved at contemplating extinction --- the deaths of so many life forms. "It is important to realize…

Butterworth's Response

Mark Butterworth has responded to my post on his own blog with his thoughts on what he sees as an inevitable civil war. He says: I'm trying to recall the circumstances which first prompted my musings on a future civil war. I believe that it was in watching the Democrats attack the Republicans in the run up to the last election that had something to do with it. Well I don't know what led to those thoughts, but the immediate context, as you can see in your original post, was you taking the side of Dennis Prager in a dispute with Jonah Goldberg over whether cultural wars are metaphorical or…

Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought

The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it's a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving an exotic particle produced in an accelerator. In a technical sense, it's a really impressive piece of work, and as a bonus, the result is surprising. This is worth a little explanation, in the usual Q&A format. So, what did they do to measure the size of a proton? Can you get rulers that small…

Saletan vs. Myers on Nye vs. Ham

It's time to get caught up on a few things. The Nye/Ham debate attracted reams of commentary, some of it sensible, some not so much. Two of the sillier entries came from William Saletan over at Slate He's very worked up about Bill Nye's claim that creationism poses a threat to our scientific future. Saletan writes: Ham presented videos from several scientists who espoused young-Earth creationism. One said he had invented the MRI scanner. Another said he had designed major components of spacecraft launched by NASA and the European Space Agency. If the spacecraft guy had botched his work,…

Some Blogging Philosophy

As usual, I'm late to this particular party. Over at BayBlab, a blogger calling himself “Anonymous Coward” offers up some choice words for the all-powerful, all-consuming, resistance-is-futile ScienceBlogs combine: If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays. Seed Magazine and the bloggers themselves profit from the traffic. That's right,…

The Perils of False Certainty

Except for the part about getting up early on a Saturday, I've always kind of liked graduation. Quite a few of our graduating majors have had several courses with me, so it was nice to be able to congratulate them and meet their families. And since our stadium here is currently under construction, we have temporarily dispensed with the big, everyone-in-one-place ceremony in favor of a series of smaller productions, one for each college within the university. That gets the whole thing down to just under an hour, which seems like a good length. And since I'm up at this hour anyway I might…

Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2009

I don't really like end-of-the-year lists. They seem a bit too self-knowing and forced, and there are just so many of them, particularly because we're heralding the end of a decade too. I half-expect someone to create a Top Ten Years of the Decade list (and Time Out would probably put 1977 in there just to be edgy). This might seem like a funny way of introducing an end-of-the-year list, but I've tried to make this one a bit different. This is not a collection of the "top" scientific discoveries of the year. I'm not calling them "breakthroughs". I'm not judging them on such abstract and…

The Equilibrium Theory of Games

The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games. I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named…

Science Literacy and the New Atheist Ideology: Rethinking Definitions and Relevance

Next week there will be big news on the science communication front. In anticipation, I was just going back over some things that I have written on the topic over the past decade. I ran across an essay I wrote for Skeptical Inquirer from 2003, which I posted below the fold. The essay puts into context an interesting debate that took place in the pages of The Guardian between eminent UK scientist Susan Greenfield and science communication professor Jon Turney. Greenfield's side of the debate reflects a continued dominant line of thinking referred to as the "deficit model," the assumption that…

For Prospective Alzheimer's Drugs, It's All About Location, Location, Location

One of the more common questions I get is why they haven't found any drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. (But they have, haven't they? What about cholinesterase inhibitors like Aricept? Ed. Those drugs mask the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but they do not change the clinical course.) Drug companies are particularly gifted at finding molecules to inhibit all the enzymes in our bodies. We know the enzymes involved in the etiology of Alzheimer's (as I will explain in a second). Why can't we inhibit them? The problem with inhibiting the enzymes involved in Alzheimer's and hence treating…

Wandering the Past in Rome

A few days ago, my family was wandering the ruins of the Roman Forum. I explained to my daughters that the fragments of pillars around us were very old. Veronica, who is four, wanted to know how old. They were made before she was born, I explained. Before her sister Charlotte was born. Before Charlotte was born? she asked. Actually, before I was born, I said. They were built before I was born, and fell down before I was born. That last part was a bit too much for her. Trying to comprehend deep time was actually the reason we were in Rome in the first place. I was invited to give a lecture…

The Lancet Report - Criticizing my Criticisms

My post on the Lancet article has attracted a fair amount of comment, both in the comments here and on other blogs. On the whole, those who have addressed my criticisms have disagreed with them. I've read the criticisms and re-read both the new and the 2004 Iraqi death toll studies a couple of more times. Between the two, I've become convinced that some (but not all) of my earlier concerns were unjustified. In this post, I'm going to try to respond to most of the substantive criticisms (and a few of the other comments). I'll let you know where my views have changed, and I'll try to clarify…

Mayr's Whig: repost

[This is another repost from my old blog. I am sitting at home suffering with a hole in my jaw where a tooth, or its remnants was extracted with extreme prejudice, so I don't feel much like blogging.] The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. After a decent period to mourn the death of one of the greatest biologists of the century on any measure, perhaps it is time now to reassess how Mayr's legacy is to be presented. I have no competence to debate his scientific ideas - if speciation is mostly allopatric, or if it is…

Myth 4: Darwin was a gradualist

This myth has more to do with what people thought their own views contrasted to, than anything Darwin said, but like all myths, there's a hint of truth underlying it. The problem with this myth is the ambiguity of the term "gradual". It is a weasel word, which can mean one thing at one point and another when the first meaning has no purchase. This is referred to the fallacy of ambiguity in logic: when attacking terms in science, one must make sure the terms stay the same form beginning to end. "Gradual" can mean one or more of the following things: Steady: the rate of change is constant…

What's going on with Robert O. Young?

There is no doubt in my mind that Robert O. Young is among the worst cancer quacks I have ever encountered. I’ve never been able to figure out how he manages to continue to practice after over 20 years, given the egregiousness of his quackery. Indeed, I was overjoyed when I learned back in January when finally—finally!—I got to see Young in a prison jumpsuit being hauled before a judge after having been arrested and charged with 18 felony counts of grand theft and practicing medicine without a license, as well as administering intravenous treatments in an unlicensed facility. As I noted at…

Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest, part 2 (Dr. Whitaker responds)

During this year's TAM, I had the distinct pleasure of accompanying Steve Novella and Michael Shermer to debate an antivaccinationist at FreedomFest, a conservative/libertarian confab that was going on in Las Vegas at the same time as TAM. That antivaccinationist turned out to be Dr. Julian Whitaker, a man who champions Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and is one of Suzanne Somer's doctors. There's no polite way to put this, Steve Novella wiped the floor with Dr. Whitaker, mercilessly pummeling him with facts, analysis, and logic to the point where even the audience appeared to be grumbling. Even…

Just when I thought I had heard every bone-headed historical analogy by antivaccinationists

Ever since SB 277 became law, I didn't think I'd be writing about it much anymore. Actually, I probably won't be writing about it much any more, because it's now a done deal. It's the law of the land in California. Beginning in 2016, non-medical exemptions (i.e., religious exemptions and personal belief exemptions) to school vaccine mandates will go away. Only medical exemptions will be permitted, which is as it should be. Sure, implementation will be a big deal, and I'll probably have something to say about it as news of how it will happen filters out. However, right now, not much is going…

Dawkins vs. Quinn

As some of you might have heard, the Raving Atheist has been getting increasingly wacky and wobbling towards some weirdly irrational beliefs. The latest turn in the saga is that his disaffected readers have jumped ship and have started a brand new site, Raving Atheists. It's a shame, really: the Raving Atheist was one of the earlier blogs where godlessness was loudly and proudly expressed, and he had a strong community of atheist readers who congregated there, and who are now off on their own site. If nothing else, we can all thank RA for stimulating an interesting group of people. Another…

Why scientific medicine just can't win in testimonials

Over the last month or so, I've written numerous posts about Daniel Hauser. Danny, as you recall, is the 13-year-old Minnesota boy who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma back in February, underwent one round of chemotherapy for it, and then decided that he wanted to pursue quackery instead of more chemotherapy. His mother supported his decision and justified it by appealing to a faux Native American religion known as Nemenhah, which is, in reality, nothing more than an excuse for its originator, a wannabe who named himself Chief Cloudpiler, to sell quackery under the guise of "Native…

The Associated Press on a roll: Actual articles on cancer quackery

Yesterday, I marveled at an article that appeared on the Associated Press new feed that basically said a lot of things about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers, how so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" 9CAM) is finding its way into the mainstream despite almost nonexistent evidence for the efficacy the vast majority of them, and how supplements are virtually unregulated. If the article had mentioned the extreme scientific and biological implausibility of nearly all of the non-herbal CAM therapies that are routinely promoted, it would have…

Eat your fruit and veggies?

Eat your fruits and vegetables. Hasn't that been a constant refrain over the years from public health authorities? Certainly, I have. The benefits of eating fruits and vegetables have been widely touted, and seemingly with good reason. A diet high in fruits and vegetables, it is said, reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. In the case of the latter, it as claimed that potential decreases in the risks of some cancers could be as high as 50% a day. As a result, the National Cancer Institute developed the 5-A-Day program, whose goal was to increase people's consumption of fruits…

It'll take more than Shannon Brownlee's bloviations to make this doctor's head explode

Mike the Mad Biologist posts a link to and excerpt from an article that he seems to think will make "M.D.'s heads explode." It didn't. At least, not in the case of this M.D. Basically, it's about physician reimbursement, a topic guaranteed provoke controversy, divided between those who think doctors are already overpaid (most non-physicians) and those who do not (most doctors). The article is by Shannon Brownlee and makes a proposal that is breathtakingly naive and poorly thought out: ...we don't end up saving any money by tightening reimbursements. But we do end up pissing off doctors, who…

Water on Mars, Part 1

Planetary geology is a fascinating area--particularly when it pertains to the search for extraterrestrial life. I wrote about it once during my brief stint as a student science writer, but it's not an area that I've really covered on my blog. However, a former colleague of mine from Oxford, Bethany Ehlmann, was recently involved with a couple of papers on geological formations left by ancient Martian water, so I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity. Ehlmann is currently a PhD student in the geological sciences at Brown University and part of the CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance…

Patterson and Kehoe, and the great lead debate

You know what is really impressing me about Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos? That he doesn't hesitate to draw connections between science and how we live our lives — there is an implicit understanding that science has become fundamental to how we see the universe. Last night's episode was no exception. What started as an explanation for how we know the age of the earth (4.55 billion years), as established by the rigorous measurement of the ratio of lead to uranium in meteorites by Claire Patterson, became an exploration of health and the misuse of science, as personified by Robert Kehoe.…

No, the CDC did not just apologize and admit that this year’s flu vaccine doesn’t work, part 2

It looks like this year's going to be a bad flu season. Hard as it is for me to believe, it was only five weeks ago when I discussed an announcement by the CDC that this year's flu vaccine would likely be less effective because it isn't a good match for the influenza strains in circulation this year. Those familiar with how the flu vaccine is developed every year know that the composition of the vaccine depends on the WHO's choice of the three or four strains that its experts deem most likely to cause significant human suffering and death in the coming flu season. Basically, the WHO has to…

An old "friend" thinks Ayurvedic "auto-urine therapy" can cure Ebola

I'm beginning to feel that I'm flogging a topic a bit too hard again. Usually, this happens primarily when I'm on a roll over some particularly tasty ridiculous tidbit of antivaccine nonsense. This time around, it's not so much antivaccine nonsense (although some did manage to slip its way into the discussion) but rather Ebola virus disease. In particular, it's the conspiracy theories and quackery that have sprung up in the media like so much kudzu smothering rational and science-based discourse, revealing the depths of distrust based on politics, pseudoscience, and just plain nonsense…

A Michigan doctor reveals plan to stop autism...hilarity ensues

Yesterday, the CDC held a Twitter party for National Infant Immunization Week, which is, conveniently enough, this week. Our old "friend" Ginger Taylor tried to call in her squadron of flying antivaccine monkeys to fling poo at what should have been a celebration of the success of vaccines; so I sent up the Bat Signal, the better to attract some voices of reason to the sliming of the #CDCvax hashtag used for the Twitter party to counter the antivaccine quacks. P.Z. Myers picked up the call too, and the rest is history. I almost felt sorry for Ginger and her fellow antivaccine loons, as they…

Stanislaw Burzynski gets off on a technicality

NOTE: Special thanks to Jann Bellamy for advising me regarding the legal aspects of this post. There are times when I fear that I'm writing about the same topic too many times in too brief a period of time. Most commonly, I notice this concern when writing about the lunacy of the anti-vaccine movement. In fact, it's fairly rare that I feel it for any other topic. There is, however, one topic other than antivaccinationist assaults against science and reason that will sometimes obligate me to go on a roll such that I might write multiple posts in a short period of time. I'm referring, of course…

The Republican Party of Donald Trump vs. science

I’ve frequently said that a tendency towards pseudoscience knows no political boundary. For example, antivaccine views, contrary to common belief, are not detectably more prevalent on the left than on the right, as I’ve discussed on more than one occasion. It’s just that for so many years, antivaccine beliefs were associated in the media with crunchy, back-to-nature lefties, and still are to some extent. (I’m talking to you Jill Stein.) However, last year the battle over SB 277, the new California law that eliminates nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, and the Republican…

Dealing with conflicts over evolution education

The sky is blue. Winter is cold. Jerry Coyne is upset with NCSE. These are the implacable truths anchoring us in reality. The interesting question is not whether Coyne is upset with NCSE, but what he's upset about this time. Today, Coyne is upset that the award-winning, NSF-funded website Understanding Evolution addresses a common objection to evolution. (Full disclosure: NCSE assists Understanding Evolution and is listed as a co-organizer of the site. I've never worked on the site, but I work at NCSE. As it says in the sidebar, this blog is my own private thing, not NCSE's. Look…

Sunday Sacrilege: The greatest blasphemy of them all

I've been following the news lately, and have at last unearthed the most horrible, awful, evil thing you can do to a religion, the one simple thing that will get the faithful to melt down. Tattling. Oh, no, don't you tell on the church! It ought to be the first commandment. Church leaders can engage in the most ghastly, demeaning, terrible crimes, like raping children, and the concern isn't for the young people who've been hurt — instead, it's a worry that the revelation of human imperfection among priests might diminish people's dedication to the faith, so it must be covered up. The guilty…

The Natural Basis for Inequality of the Sexes

Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast?1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature (such as gravity) or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach and following FDA guidelines will not do you in. A naturalistic…

The Three Musketeers of Woo meet d'Artagnan to fight for woo on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal

The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of "alternative," that it is in fact mainstream and even "scientific." That very search for respectability without accountability is the very reason why "alternative" medicine originally morphed into CAM in order to soften the "alternative" label a decade or two ago. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical…