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Evolution of a polyphenism

Here's some very cool news: scientists have directly observed the evolution of a complex, polygenic, polyphenic trait by genetic assimilation and accommodation in the laboratory. This is important, because it is simultaneously yet another demonstration of the fact of evolution, and an exploration of mechanisms of evolution—showing that evolution is more sophisticated than changes in the coding sequences of individual genes spreading through a population, but is also a consequence of the accumulation of masked variation, synergistic interactions between different alleles and the environment,…

Area 51 veterans speak: No space aliens

One of the most persistent and prevalent examples of a modern myth that will not die is the story of Area 51. So ingrained in our culture has it become that nearly everyone (at least in the U.S.) knows what you are talking about when you refer to it. It's been featured in movies as diverse as Independence Day (one of my favorite big budget, brain-meltingly silly end-of-the-world movies about alien invasion) and, of course, Area 51. Forests of trees have been slain in order to publish books on the subject, and cable TV channels serve up near constant stream of documentaries either about Area…

Gut disorders and autism: A new consensus statement

One of the key claims of the "autism biomedical" movement is that something about autism derives from or is exacerbated by the gut; i.e., that there is some sort of link between GI problems, particularly inflammatory diseases of the GI tract, and autism. Although I may not be as versed in the history of this claim as I could be, as far as I can tell, even if this idea didn't originate with Andrew Wakefield, he certainly did a lot to popularize it. Indeed, a common misconception about his misbegotten 1998 Lancet paper that launched the anti-MMR anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. is that it…

When you dismiss every scientific study, you open the door to believing anything

I'm back. If there's one thing I've noticed in the nearly five years that I've been doing this blog thing, it's that getting started again after taking even a few days off is hard. There's a bit of paralysis that sets in. I get used to not having to think about what I want to write, and often there are a number of things that I almost certainly would have written about. Fortunately, for at least one of them, PalMD took care of it it for me. Otherwise, the blogger whose post he deconstructed would have tasted a bit of the ol' not-so-Respectful Insolence for in essence laying down a load of po-…

Dan Olmsted joins Mike Adams in abusing Breast Cancer Awareness month for his own purposes

Having gotten into the whole idea of blogging about peer-reviewed research yesterday and even using a spiffy new icon to denote that that's what I'm doing, originally I had planned on looking up another interesting article or pulling one from my recent reading list and blogging about it. Then, realizing that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is over after today, I happened to come across an article that reminds me of something that's appropriate for today, namely Halloween. Yes, it's that mercury maven of mavens, that tireless crusader who thinks he found that the Amish don't get autism and,…

What is "ethnoscience"?

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006. I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…

A crank's favorite gambit: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus

Perhaps you've seen it. Certainly if you've seen the "arguments" of Holocaust deniers, you've seen it. The desperate attempt to find one piece of testimony, data, or evidence that does not support conventional science or history. For example, a Holocaust denier will zero in on an eyewitness account of either a death camp or a Nazi atrocity that doesn't quite add up. Alternatively, he will make much of the discovery of a false "Holocaust survivor," as if finding out that someone lying about having survived the Holocaust somehow invalidates its historicity. For example: For half a century now…

Brain death and fundamentalist religion

I realize that the title of this post might sound as though I'm equating brain death and fundamentalist religion. As tempting as it is sometimes to do so, I'm not. What I'm more interested in is a story I came across by way of ScienceBlogs Big Kahuna blogger P.Z. Myers last night, mainly because it brings up some serious ethical issues, aside from any religious issues. P.Z. tackled the story as he usually does tackle stories involving religion, with all the subtlety of a jack hammer in a glass factory. I'm not saying that I'll necessarily be subtle, but I do have some actual, hands-on…

The Perfect Simulation: A Haunted Tale

Last week, I discussed the difficulty of creating a perfect model of our environment. Once, I toyed around with the idea of a perfect simulation... wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from reality? What if we created the perfect model--and it turned out to actually be reality? As advanced as our technology is, we obviously won’t have to worry about this any time soon. But in a science fiction story, where plausibility is a little plastic, we can explore such questions. So, that’s what I did last year--I wrote a story. And here it is: Ω By Karmen Lee Franklin The General swept his fingers…

Carnival of Feminists #65

Welcome to the 65th biweekly showcase of the feminist blogosphere! Here's just a taste of what's inside: Owning privilege is not about feeling ashamed, it is about acknowledging the benefits that one receives without having to work for them. And now today an excited colleague announced that he had just discovered this totally new concept on the internet: white privilege! Even though I've been teaching the idea for over a decade, and it's even discussed in our textbook, it was news to him. Not a lesbian, not homosexual, but 'gay' with such venom I swear her eyes turned red, smoke came…

Joe Carter strings together some noise

Joe Carter is making a curiously convoluted argument. He's trying to get at why the majority of the American public does not accept the theory of evolution, and he's made a ten part list of reasons, which boils down to placing the blame on the critics of intelligent design creationism. We're all bad, bad people who are doing a bad, bad job of informing the public and doing a good job of antagonizing them. There is a germ of truth there—I do think we all have to do a better job of educating American citizens—but what makes it a curious and ultimately dishonest argument is that Joe Carter is a…

Astronomer for Hire

Hey, Bora got a job interview by suggesting that he was the right person for the job on his blog. I don't have the specific job in hand, but it's a public forum. Perhaps there's somebody out there looking for me, only they don't know it, and I don't know it. And, let me quote Bora again, because I've demonstrated that this quote also applies to me: "Some people like to keep secrets, but I like to air my thoughts in public (why have a blog otherwise?)...." What can I do for you? I've got skills, aptitudes, attitudes, and goals that may be perfectly matched by something out there I haven't…

A field guide to biomedical meeting creatures, part 1: Any questions?

Orac is currently away at the ASCO meeting in Chicago. Shockingly, he was so busy that he didn't bother to write anything last night. Fortunately, he found something from the archives that's perfect for this occasion. This was originally written in 2005 on the "old' Respectful Insolence blog and then reposted in 2006. That' means if you haven't been reading at least three and a half years, it's new to you. It's also related to scientific meetings. Hmmm. This reminds me. I really should update this or do more installations in the saga, even if five years late. If you have any ideas, leave 'em…

The physician-scientist: An endangered species?

After diving into a heapin' helpin' of sheer craziness over the last week or two (well, except for yesterday, when I deconstructed an acupuncture study, which, while not crazy, certainly was misguided), I think it's time for a bit of self-absorbed navel gazing. After all, isn't that what bloggin's all about? Oh, wait, that's what I do almost every day here. No, what I really mean is that I came across an article that struck rather close to home regarding my career trajectory. So, if you don't mind, for one day I'll leave behind the rabid anti-vaccine loons, the homepaths, the alt-med mavens,…

Too deliciously ironic for words: Gary Null hoist with his own petard

In the wake of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War, I was going to have a bit of fun with the reactions of the anti-vaccine fringe. After all, the spokescelebrity of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy, has posted yet another brain dead screed at--where else?--The Huffington Post. So has everybody's favorite pediatrician to the stars and apologist for the anti-vaccine movement, Dr. Jay Gordon. Both are incredibly target-rich environments, each worthy of its very own heapin', helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Truly, we have an embarrassment of riches here as far as blogging material…

Who knew? My state's vaccine personal belief exemption rate stinks!

One aspect of my life that's kind of strange is how I've basically ended up back where I started. I was born and raised in southeast Michigan (born in the city of Detroit, actually, although my parents moved to the suburbs when I was 10). After going to college and medical school at the University of Michigan, I matched at a residency in Cleveland (regular readers know that it was Case Western Reserve University), and then did a fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Chicago. Finally, I ended up taking my first "real" (i.e., faculty) job at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey…

Throwing everything but the kitchen sink, quackery-wise, at Ebola

You know how I sometimes lament that I’ve been writing too much about the hijinx of the antivaccine movement, its crimes against reason, science, and medicine? It’s become a bit of a trope around here at times, to the point where, when I bring it up, I tell myself I shouldn’t be repeating myself so often. Then I do it anyway because, heck, this is blogging and it’s impossible to blog for a decade without repeating one’s self. Besides, if I’m to start navel-gazing here in a blog sense, a successful blog actually needs certain repeating tropes, as long as they’re relatively entertaining or…

Primitive Cultures are Simple, Civilization is Complex (A falsehood) I

This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the falshoodosity of the belief is a learning experience, if it is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry. In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning opportunity it is important to define the statement in terms of the thoughts the falsehood invokes in the target…

Oh, joy. His Royal Quackiness will be gracing us with his presence in March

Oh, goody. Here's something we didn't need here in the US. While Australian skeptics have successfully been rallying to put a stop to a series of lectures from American antivaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, we're going to have to put up with a far bigger name in quackery showing up right here in the good ol' U. S. of A. I'm referring to His Royal Highness, the Quacktitioner Royal, Prince Charles, the next King of England. Yes, in March he and Camilla will be here on a four day tour that will include a trip to Louisville to give the keynote address to a symposium on health and nature on March…

Chili's gets burned by an antivaccine group posing as an "autism advocacy" group

Here I am, sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in sunny San Diego, as I get ready to head over to the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The sun is rising over the mountains, and the only sound I hear is that of running water in the swimming pool below (well, that and traffic around the convention center, the odd siren, and the noise of air conditioner fans), and I need to produce something quick for the blog. Realizing that last week, I described myself as having fallen into a "rut," not because I thought my posts were substandard but rather because I…

Stanislaw Burzynski and the cynical use of cancer patients as shields and weapons against the FDA: Has the FDA caved?

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." I know I've used that quote before several times over the 9+ years that I've been blogging. These days, I probably use it most frequently when it comes to the topic of Stanislaw Burzynski. Every time I think that I can give the topic a rest for a while (and, believe me, I do want to give it a rest), something invariably seems to happen to pull me back in. So it was yesterday when i was made aware of a new development so disappointing that I'm still wiping the dirt off my chin from my jaw dropping to the floor. Even more amazing is that…

On undisclosed conflicts of interest in medicine, science, and skepticism

I've written about conflicts of interest (COIs) a lot over the years. COIs are important in medicine and science because, as much as physicians and scientists like to think that they are immune to such things, we are as human as anyone else. We are just as prone to unconsciously (or consciously) being influenced by self-interest related to our COIs. Most of the time, for purposes of science, COIs are considered to be mostly financial in nature: employment or payments from a drug company, a financial interest in a treatment being studied, and the like. Andrew Wakefield is a classic example in…

The antivaccine movement buys Representative Darrell Issa for $40,000

If there's one thing I've learned about antivaccinationists, it's that they're all about the double standards. For instance, to them if Paul Offit makes money off of his rotavirus vaccine, he's a pharma shill, a hopelessly compromised "biostitute" (as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called him) or "Dr. Proffit", and therefore to be dismissed on that basis alone regardless of his knowledge of science. If I happen to get a small grant from a pharmaceutical company, even though it isn't even enough to pay the full salary of a postdoctoral fellow, or receive a small amount of money for my blogging from a…

The results of the unethical and misbegotten Trial to Asess Chelation Therapy (TACT) are finally revealed, part 2

With very limited exceptions, chelation therapy is, as I said before in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. The sole exception is for real, documented cases of acute heavy metal poisoning that are known to respond to chelation, such as iron overload due to transfusion, aluminum overload due to hemodialysis, copper toxicity due to Wilson's disease, acute heavy metal toxicity, and a handful of other indications. Basically, chelation therapy involves infusing chemicals that can bind to metal ions and make them easier for the kidneys to excrete. The problem is, there is no good basic…

How "they" view "us"

Those of us who dedicate considerable time and effort to combatting quackery generally do it because we think we're doing good. Certainly, I wouldn't spend so much time nearly every evening blogging the way I do if I didn't think so. It's true that I also enjoy it, but if I were doing this just for enjoyment I'm sure I could manage to find other topics that I could write about. In actuality, way back in deepest darkest beginnings of this blog, I did write about a lot of other things. My skeptical topics were more general in nature, encompassing not just medicine but evolution versus "…

Some post-holiday antivaccine "science"

I hope that you and yours are having a fantastic holiday season thus far. Yesterday, we had a great family gathering, after which I settled down to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special; all in all, a most excellent Christmas Day. Unfortunately, towards the later part of the day, someone out there sent me an e-mail and, fool that I was, I actually read it. (Who is sending e-mails about bad science to random bloggers on Christmas evening, I ask?) So when I woke up this morning, fool again that I am, I actually read the danged thing. Of course, I should have known that this was going to be…

Training your brain to order your immune system to destroy its pathogen enemies?

Well, I'm back. It's been a long week away, and very enjoyable, although I must say that such long trips tend to drain one. That's why I'm always on the lookout for something to restore lost energy and vigor, sucked out of me from long hours cramped on an airplane and holed up in airports, just trying to get to a vacation and then later to wend my way home. Of course, as a physician and skeptic, I know that just taking a rest, going to bed on time and getting up on time, and waiting for my body's clock to reset to the new location and cure me of jet lag would work, but that's just too slow.…

Quackademic medicine involving reflexology

Reflexology is quackery. It's based on magical thinking that views every major organ in the body as somehow mappable to specific points on the soles of the feet or the palms of the hands and posits that somehow massaging these areas can have therapeutic effects on the organs in question. Claims regularly made for reflexology include that it can "detoxify" the body, increase circulation, assist in weight loss, and improve the health of organs. Other conditions for which quacks claim reflexology is efficacious include earaches, anemia, bedwetting, bronchitis, convulsions in an infant,…

American Academy of Family Physicians embraces quackademic medicine

In a week and a half, Harriet Hall, Kimball Atwood, and I will be joining Eugenie C. Scott at CSICon to do a session entitled Teaching Pseudoscience in Medical (and Other) Schools. As you might imagine, we will be discussing the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia and medical training, a phenomenon I frequently refer to as "quackademic medicine." It's a topic that has been much discussed on this blog; so I am quite confident that we are the people to tell our audience just how bad it is, why it's happening, and why you should be concerned about it. Also, from my perpective,…

Teaching critical thinking to combat fake news and bullshit: You have to start young

As much as I like to deconstruct pseudoscientific claims, particularly about health, medicine, and health care, Sometimes it gets a bit draining. There's just so much pseudoscience, so much credulity, so much sheer idiocy out there that trying to refute them and encourage a more skeptical mindset often feels like pissing into the ocean, for all the effect it has. In the age of fake news and Donald Trump, it even feels as though we're going backward—and not slowly, either. That's why I felt it was time for a bit of a break, a bit more optimism than I've been able to muster before. So it was a…

"Disruptive" functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic: Disrupting medicine by mixing quackery with it

That the Cleveland Clinic has become one of the leading institutions, if not the leading institution, in embracing quackademic medicine is now indisputable. Indeed, 2017 greeted me with a reminder of just how low the Clinic has gone when the director of its Wellness Institute published a blatantly antivaccine article for a local publication, which led to a firestorm of publicity in the medical blogosphere, social media, and conventional media to the point where the Cleveland Clinic's CEO Dr. Toby Cosgrove had to respond. Dr. Cosgrove was—shall we say?—not particularly convincing. Indeed, even…

In the age of Donald Trump, vaccine policy is becoming politicized, with potentially deadly consequences

Back in December, I took note of the vaccine situation in Texas. First, I pointed out how a new article by Peter Hotez, MD, a pediatrician at Baylor University, had sounded the alarm that the number of schoolchildren with nonmedical exemptions to the Texas school vaccine mandate had skyrocketed by 19-fold over the last 13 or 14 years. As if that weren't alarming enough, I discussed the resident antivaccine groups in Texas, who had become quite active. I thought that that was probably all I would write about Texas for a while. Silly me. Texas is fast turning into a series of its own, much as I…

This could be the most ludicrous version of the "toxins" gambit I've ever seen

One of the oldest antivaccine tropes that first encountered is one that I like to call the “toxins gambit.” Basically, this is an antivaccine lie that portrays vaccines as being laden with all manner of “toxins” because they have—gasp!—chemicals with scary sounding names and even some chemicals that are toxic. The lie derives from the the famous adage that the “dose makes the poison.” For instance, it’s well known that there are traces of formaldehyde in some vaccines left over from the production process. Sounds scary, right? Certainly our old buddy the antivaccine-sympathetic pediatrician…

What is compatibility?

Sean Carroll, one of the sharpest guys out there, says that science and religion are not compatible. I happen to think he's using an idiosyncratic (but not necessarily wrong) definition to reach that conclusion: are science and religion actually compatible? Clearly one’s stance on that issue will affect one’s feelings about accomodationism. So I’d like to put my own feelings down in one place. Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori…

On the unseriousness of anti-choicers

Hilzoy and Megan McArdle have had an exchange over abortion, which includes, as these discussions always do, a ton of talking-past-each-other. This tends to happen, because anti-choicers tend to ignore the pregnant woman, and put all their attention on the well-being of the embryo (and my friend John B., a member of George Tiller's church, has a great post showing how this framing of the issue has influenced our national discourse on abortion). Pro-choice advocates are focused on the pregnant woman's rights, and have diverse views on the moral status of an embryo. This results in one…

Chaos

One mathematical topic that I find fascinating, but which I've never had a chance to study formally is chaos. I've been sort of non-motivated about blog-writing lately due to so many demands on my time, which has left me feeling somewhat guilty towards those of you who follow this blog. So I decided to take this topic about which I know very little, and use the blog as an excuse to learn something about it. That gives you something interesting to read, and it gives me something to motivate me to write. I'll start off with a non-mathematical reason for why it interests me. Chaos is a very…

Astrology and the Olympics

An alert reader sent me link to a href="http://africa.reuters.com/odd/news/usnPEK21146.html">stupid article published by Reuters about the Olympics and Astrology. It's a classic kind of crackpot silliness, which I've described in numerous articles before. It's yet another example of pareidolia - that is, seeing patterns where there aren't any. When we look at large quantities of data, there are bound to be things that look like patterns. In fact, it would be surprising if there weren't apparent parents for us to find. That's just the nature of large quantities of data. In this case…

The moulding of senescence by natural selection

The moulding of senescence by natural selection is not one of William D. Hamilton's favorite papers. In the biographical introduction he notes that both Peter Medawar & George C. Williams covered the same ground in the 1950s; a fact that he was not aware of by the time he had already invested a great deal of thought on the topic at hand. The general mathematical treatment within this paper extends the arguments of Williams in particular; but Hamilton admits that his value-add is on the margins and likely not worth the mathematical formalism which he spun out to converge upon insights…

On words: democracy & dictatorship

Over at the Sepia Mutiny blog there has been seem dispute over whether Pervez Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan. Some contributors are appalled, while others are urging caution. One of the posts was titled In defense of a dictator, and it understandably drew a lot of fire from those who make a vociferous case for democracy over the dictator. But I think there are some problems here. Too much of our discourse is defined by a bipolar framing of the issues between democracy and dicatorship, as if these two states are binary opposites inverted on all characters. When…

Coming up at the USA Science & Engineering Festival this Weekend!

Discover the STEM Power of Lockheed Martin at the USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo in April Have you ever wondered what it would be like to pilot the F-35 or a flying robot? Or how cold it is in Antarctica (a region known as the most frigid place on Earth)? In addition to what the next big thing in batteries is, and can medicine really be  personalized for every individual? At Festival Expo 2014 you'll experience the answer to these and other questions in unforgettable ways with founding and presenting sponsor of the Festival, Lockheed Martin through exciting interactive,…

How eyes talk to each other?

One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output. In the case of mammals, the two pacemakers are the left and the right suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The tow nuclei are anatomically close to each other and have direct nerve connections between them, so it is not difficult to imagine how the two clocks manage to remain continuously coupled (syncronized) to each other and, together, produce a single output, thus synchronizing all the rhythms in the body. In the…

Flu antivirals: the good news (they work), the bad news (not very well), the good news in the bad news (we're not likely to lose much)

Yesterday (today as I am writing this) the British Medical Journal published another Cochrane meta-analysis on the efficacy of neurimminidase inhibitor antivirals (the only two in use now, being oseltamivir [Tamiflu] and zanimivir [Relenza]). Their conclusions have made the news, so I guess I should cast my baleful eye on their handiwork. I think there is less here than meets the eye, but first let's look at what meets the eye. This is a meta-analysis, that is, an analysis of other analyses, the other analyses in this case being drug trials of Tamiflu or Relanza in children. So it's an…

Beauty: Not Just Feather-Deep

This was a meme I posted back on my birthday last year (May 11, 2006) - it's a shame not to move it to the new archives here.... ------------------------------------------- Carel Brest van Kempen tagged me with the 10 bird meme. A DC Birding Blog started the meme and is collecting the responses (over 50 so far) here. As you can see, those are all birders and birdwatchers, real pros. They really know their birds. They picked their choices by beauty and grace, or by special meaning in their lives, or by excitement of having seen them. But I am, unfortunately, not a birdwatcher. I always…

Will history of health hazards be repeated at new Wisconsin iron mine?

The long-time residents of Iron County, Wisconsin who make up the Iron County Joint Impacts Mining Committee say the open-pit iron mine planned for the Penokee Hills of northern Wisconsin – a range that extends into Michigan where it’s known as the Gogebic Range – will bring much needed good jobs and economic development. Such jobs, the committee told a group of visiting journalists in August, have been lacking since the last Wisconsin iron mines in the area closed in the early and mid-1960s. The jobs the mine would bring are the type needed to keep local communities’ young people from moving…

Regional Food Analysis

My absolute favorite kinds of presentations to give (even though they are by far the most work) are the one's I've been doing increasingly often, giving analyses of regional food security. I focus on both present and prospective food issues in a lower energy, less economically stable and warmer future. in them I set out both the historical crops and food source of the region, and what is currently produced there, and explore what steps a community or a bioregion might take to enhance their food security. I examine underutilized resources, and what else might be brought into play. I…

Yes, Virginia, there Might be a Santa. And if there is, He's Probably Pretty Pissed.

Dear Sharon: Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. But I really need to know if there is. My Mom has been telling me about something called global warming, and I'm worried about Santa, because he lives up at the North Pole, and if it melts, he'll be in trouble. My Mom said some grownups were working hard in a place called Copenhagen to fix the problem, and I heard someone on the news say they decided something and someone else said they didn't. What happened in Copenhagen? Is there really a Santa, and what's going to happen to the North Pole? Please tell me the truth!…

Safety whistleblower spoke "on a matter of public concern"

Speaking on a "matter of public concern," is protected speech, according to a federal jury in Becky McClain v. Pfizer, Inc. In this case, the jury found that being exposed at work to a genetically engineered virus or other biotech agents is indeed a legitimate matter of public concern. It involved Ms. Becky McClain who was employed as a molecular biologist by the pharmaceutical giant at their Groton, CT research center. She raised concerns in 2002-2003 about unsafe lab practices including procedures involving a genetically-modified viruses, (a pseudotype Lentivirus, HIV with a Vesicular…

Cranks cry persecution, Nisbet listens

Ever since we began writing here about denialism we've emphasized a few critical points about dealing with anti-science. For one, denialists aren't interested in legitimate debate - they are not honest brokers and the tactics they use exist to artificially extend discussion of settled scientific issues. Second, one of the most time-honored traditions of cranks is claiming persecution in response to rejection of their nonsense. Take for a recent example Coby's exposure of the "environmentalists want to jail global warming denialists" myth. You don't need to do anything to make a crank cry…

No Imagination Without Religion? Lee Seigel is an idiot.

Noted sockpuppet and sniveler Lee Siegel warns us that the new militant atheists may be closing the book on imagination. And for some reason the LA Times saw fit to publish this tripe. In the last few years, so many books have rolled off the presses challenging God, belief and religion itself (by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger and Christopher Hitchens, among others) that a visitor from another planet might think America was in the iron throes of priestly repression. You'd never know that we live in the age of Paris Hilton, HBO, Internet porn and flip-flops. The…

Goodbye Bulo Burti boubou (sort of)

Here we are, at the beginning of 2009. And here's where I get that horrible feeling that - on the 'things to do for 2008' list - so many things remain incomplete. Among these are a number of Tet Zoo posts that were cutting-edge and topical when I started them, yet are now not so cutting-edge, and not so topical. Whatever: here's a brief article I'd planned to publish months ago. It concerns the Bulo Burti boubou Laniarius liberatus, a bush-shrike described in 1991 on the basis of a single individual captured in central Somalia (Smith et al. 1991) [adjacent photo © E. F. G. Smith]. Bush-…