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Chronicle of a Death Foretold

This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog. Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an experiment. He kept his frogs in a tank that must have been rife with bacteria that should have turned the incision into a deadly maw of infection. Zasloff wondered if something in the skin of the frog was blocking the bacteria. After months of searching, he found it. The frogs produced an antibiotic radically unlike the sort that doctors prescribed their patients. Most antibiotics kill bacteria…

Fish courtship and sex

I've been a bit sex-obsessed lately. No, no, not that way—it's all innocent, and the objects of my obsessions are all fish. A little background explanation: one of my current research projects is on the genetics of behavior. This is a difficult area, because behavior is incredibly complex with multiple levels of causation, and one has to be very careful when trying to tease apart all the tangled factors that contribute to it. It takes numbers and lots of controls to sort out the various contributors to a behavior. What we've done so far, though, is to identify and quantify a few simple,…

Peer Review

Over at the ARN blog, Denyse O'Leary has a four-part article up attacking the peer-review system. Rob Crowther, of the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, has chimed in with his own post on the topic. There's a great deal of humor in watching anti-evolutionists try to dismiss peer review as not worth the effort anyway. It bears an amazing resemblance to this really cute old fable about a fox, but I'll be kind and pretend that there is actually something more to the O'Leary and Crowther rants than good old sour grapes. Their major complaint about peer review is, of course, that…

Brachiopods: another piece in the puzzle of eye evolution

About 600 million years ago, or a little more, there was a population of small wormlike creatures that were the forebears of all modern bilaterian animals. They were small, soft-bodied, and simple, not much more than a jellyfish in structure, and they lived by crawling sluglike over the soft muck of the sea bottom. We have no fossils of them, and no direct picture of their form, but we know a surprising amount about them because we can infer the nature of their genes. These animals would have been the predecessors of flies and squid, cats and starfish, and what we can do is look at the genes…

Taxonomy was the reason for Darwin's theory

Taxonomy - the science of classifying organisms into putatively natural groups - is often treated as a kind of necessary bit of paperwork without much theoretical import by some biologists. Others think it is the single most important thing to do, usually justifying it in terms of conservation biology, but sometimes in terms of foundational knowledge. One thing that has become clear to me is exactly how foundational taxonomy is. Now, historian Polly Winsor has published a paper in the leading taxonomic journal, appropriately named Taxon, in which she argues, I believe correctly, that Darwin's…

The neuropsychology of synaesthesia

In the 1880s, Francis Galton described a condition in which "persons...almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery." This "peculiar habit of mind" is today called synaesthesia, and Galton's description clearly defines this condition as one in which stimuli of one sensory modality elicit sensations in another of the senses. There are several different kinds of synaesthesia, and the condition is now known to be far more common than was previously thought. Galton was describing a specific type of synaesthesia, called grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which printed numbers or letters…

Brain Stimulation is a More Effective Treatment for Parkinson's

Totally effective, side-effect free treatment of Parkinson's continues to elude physicians, but a study by Deuschl et al in the NEJM shows that we are definitely making progress. Deuschl et al performed a randomized study that assigned patients into one of two groups. The control group recieved the standard treatment for Parkinson's -- which right now is pharmaceuticals like the drug L-dopa. The experimental group had stimulating electrodes implanted into the subthalamic nuclei (STN) of their brain in addition to treatment with L-dopa. The study shows that the individuals in the…

About those unhappy biology students

Wow - my post about unhappy bio grad students is getting massive traffic. (Hi SlashDotters and StumbleUpon-ers!) Mike the Mad Biologist, my original inspiration, has responded here and here to all the buzz. I pretty much said everything I wanted to say in the original post, and I don't pretend to have an explanation or cure for this problem. But I see that there's been some snarkiness on the intertubez (shocking!!!) while I was away watching the developments in the Myriad appeal. So I want to clarify two points. First, let me emphasize that I'm not saying graduate students in other fields don…

Can Specific Eye Movements Aid in Complex Problem Solving?

Over at OmniBrain, Steve has a great summary of a recent article by Thomas and Lleras(1 on embodied cognition/perceptual symbol systems and problem solving. I recommend reading Steve's summary before going on with this post, but in case you're really lazy, here's the abstract: Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under…

Basic concepts: theory testing.

I'm a little cautious about adding this to the basic concepts list, given that my main point here is going to be that things are not as simple as you might guess. You've been warned. We've already taken a look at what it means for a claim to be falsifiable. Often (but not always), when scientists talk about testability, they have something like falsifiability in mind. But testing a theory against the world turns out to be more complicated than testing a single, isolated hypothesis. First, we need to set out what counts as a theory. For the purposes of this discussion, a theory is a group…

Teaching, learning, grades, and student evaluations.

Chad has posted an interesting discussion of a study of students' academic performance and how it is correlated to their evaluations of the faculty teaching them. The study in question is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432 (DOI 10.1086/653808) . Go read Chad's post for a detailed discussion of the methodology of the study, since it will likely answer your questions about my quick overview here. After the overview, I'm going to offer a few more thoughts…

With celebrity comes duties: Jenny McCarthy, Oprah Winfrey, and the ethical burden of a soapbox.

At White Coat Underground, PalMD explores the question of what kind of responsibilities might fall on celebrities, especially those who use their soapboxes in a way that exceeds the tether of their expertise. The particular celebrities under examination are Jenny McCarthy, who has used her celebrity to spread her views on the proper treatment and prevention of autism, and Oprah Winfrey, who has used her media empire to give McCarthy a soapbox with more reach. Pal writes: Jenny claims an expertise based on her personal experience. Whether one views themselves as an expert is largely…

Humpty Dumpty and cranks, quacks, and antivaccinationists

One of my favorite quotes from classic literature comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, when Alice encounters a rather strange character named Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty, as you will likely recall, was a giant egg with whom Alice got into an argument about the meaning of words: And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!' 'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' 'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down…

Goodbye Netflix, Hello Qwikster. And not really goodbye Netflix

I'm going to take the unusual move and post, below, and almost complete cut and paste of a piece of corporate informational mail from Netflix. If you are Netflix user, you've already got this in your email box, most likely. Before I do this, I want to explain why. I'm not shy about critiquing corporations on this blog, but there are three things that compel me to be supportive of Netflix at this moment. I will add a bad thing or two about Netflix as well for those of you who hate kittens. The first thing is that Netflix is not Blockbuster; Netflix is not obnoxious and evile like…

Things like this make medical science worthwhile: A drug to treat genetic diseases due to nonsense mutations

There are times when, as a scientist, I look at an idea and its execution and simply stand in awe. It's particularly satisfying when it's a relatively simple idea that could conceivably do a lot of good for a lot of patients. Oddly enough, whether it's because I've been out of the loop or because it hasn't garnered that much attention in the blogosphere (not even here in ScienceBlogs), but I only just heard of it now. It's a new drug in phase II clinical trials that has the potential to obviate or reverse the effects of a wide variety of genetic mutations that cause human disease: A pill that…

Reef Madness by David Dobbs

Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral is a book about the origins of modern science, the interplay between theory and empiricism, the machinations of the Victorian scientific gentry, epic rivalries, polyps and plankton. Reef Madness is by David Dobbs, of Neuron Culture here on Scienceblogs. Look for an upcoming Bloggingheads.tv discussion between David and me, mainly about this book. ~ A Repost because it is still a good book ~ This is a book about the competing theories presented by Alexander Agassiz and Charles Darwin about the formation of tropical…

The lovely stalk-eyed fly

Sphyrocephala beccarii Here is a spectacularly pretty and weird animal: stalk-eyed flies of the family Diopsidae. There are about 160 species in this group that exhibit this extreme morphology, with the eyes and the antennae displaced laterally on stalks. They often (but not always) are sexually dimorphic, with males having more exaggerated stalks—the longer stalks also make them clumsy in flight, so this is a pattern with considerable cost, and is thought to be the product of sexual selection. The Sphyrocephala to the right is not even an extreme example. Read on to see some genuinely…

More alt-med chicanery with the law, this time in Texas

Yesterday, I wrote about SB 31, a proposed law in North Carolina against which uber-quack Mike Adams had mobilized his "health freedom" minions and a crank organization Citizens for Health Freedom and apparently managed to bring some pressure to bear on legislators to water down the bill. The whole incident reminded me how fragile and easily dismantled even the most rudimentary laws and regulations designed to enforce a science-based standard of care and prevent the proliferation of quacks are. Dr. Rashid Buttar, for instance, can team up with a bunch of "integrative medicine" practitioners…

Don't listen to these "medical voices," or: How did I miss this loony antivaccine site before?

Let's face it, I've been at this "anti-antii-vax" thing for quite a while now. This December, this blog will have been in existence for five years. Even before that cold, gray Saturday afternoon nearly five years ago when, on a whim, I started up a blog on Blogspot that became the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence, I had been a regular presence on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative for at least three years before that. There, besides quackery, I got my first taste of the lies of the anti-vaccine movement from the likes of denizens of the newsgroup like Jan Drew and Ilena…

Palaeos found?

I got this email from Alan Kazlev, one of the main fellows working on the Palaeos website (a very useful paleontological resource), which I had previously reported as going offline. Plans are afoot to bring it back, and the answer seems to be to wikify it and build it anew, with a more distributed set of contributors. How Web 2.0! I've included the full email below the fold if you'd like more details. Hi everyone For those who don't know me, I was the co-author of Palaeos, until I got caught up in other projects that consumed all my time.   Toby White of course continued to work on the site (…

More answers from Les Roberts

The BBC did not publish all of Les Roberts' answers. Here are the rest: It seems the Lancet has been overrun by left-wing sixth formers. The report has a flawed methodology and deceit is shown in the counting process. What is your reaction to that? --Ian, Whitwick, UK Almost every researcher who studies a health problem is opposed to that health problem. For example, few people who study measles empathize with the virus. Thus, given that war is an innately political issue, and that people examining the consequences of war are generally opposed to the war's conception and continuation, it…

Zombie DDT Myth Will Not Die

Yes, the DDT ban myth is back, this time in "DDT Returns" by Apoorva Mandavilli that reads like a press release by DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria. It's in Nature Medicine of all places and is subscription only, but because I'll be quoting the bits that are wrong or misleading you'll see most of it: After decades of being marginalized as a dangerous pesticide, DDT--short for dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro ethane--is set to be reintroduced into countries that have tried, and failed, to win the fight against malaria. On 2 May, the United States Agency for International Development (…

Baseball and the never-ending hunger

Deep within Yankee Stadium, a timeless evil had arrived (well, an evil around 61 years old, anyway--well, 117 years old if you count its entire existence) shambling through the dark service corridors and halls, on a never-ending quest to satisfy its unquenchable hunger. Why it had come to this place, it did not know. Perhaps it was drawn by the eminations of pure baseball evil that routinely flowed from the so-called House That Ruth Built. Maybe it was because this place was a an icon of its hated enemy from a previous life, representing the national pastime favored by that enemy and…

The End of My Addiction, by Olivier Ameisen: Could Baclofen Be the Cure We're Looking For?

Originally posted by Scicurious On February 26, 2009, at 1:06 AM About a week ago, a prof in my MRU loaned me a book he'd just read, saying it would be right up my alley. He was very right. I couldn't put it down. It's already changed a great deal about the way that I think about addiction, as well as the way I think about finding a cure. The book was "The End of My Addiction" by Olivier Ameisen. Half case report, half memoir, Olivier Ameisen was a well-known cardiologist doing some crazy good work in New York. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic. After more than a decade of broken…

What am I doing here?

I get strange searches from google or yahoo all the time, from queries about facial hair to blowing things up. It isn't too unusual for a search engine to come up with sites unrelated to the original query, so I usually give these searches little more than a cursory glance. One search from yahoo last week, however, caught my eye: disorder to describe ability to find meaning in random information wikipedia For once, I thought, "kid, you've come to the right place." Not that they stayed... the link (#6 in the search list) led to my story, "Illusions in Lavender", which describes the world as…

The knock-out punch: Zinc Finger Nucleases

Like so many things, the problem is best explained with an analogy. Imagine a car parked in a dark garage (if you're a mechanic by hobby or trade, make it a computer). Someone hands you keys to the car, a flashlight and a piece of metal that she says belongs to a car similar to the one in the garage. Now, your task is to figure out what that the piece of metal is, and what it's for. Replace car with organism, piece of metal with gene and make the flashlight a whole lot smaller, and you have an idea of what biological research is like. For decades, those wanting to study human genes were like…

Cancer: bad genes or bad luck?

If there is one cause of cancer, it would be genetic damage to somatic cells. So all we have to do to cure cancer is prevent all genetic damage! That's not a very useful prescription, unfortunately; it's rather like saying that all we have to do to prevent accidental deaths is prohibit all potential causes of injury. The causes of genetic damage are ubiquitous. We're familiar with some. Smoking, for instance, irritates and damages the cells of the lung epithelium, and increases the rate of cancer incidence. UV radiation damages DNA, so prolonged exposure to the sun increases the rate of skin…

Why you CAN have your $1000 genome - so long as you learn what to do with it

As part of his Gene Week celebration over at Forbes, Matthew Herper has a provocative post titled "Why you can't have your $1000 genome". In this post I'll explain why, while Herper's pessimism is absolutely justified for genomes produced in a medical setting, I'm confident that I'll be obtaining my own near-$1000 genome in the not-too-distant future. Matt's underlying argument is that while sequencing costs will continue to drop, obtaining a complete genome sequence that is sufficiently accurate for medical interpretation will require additional expenses (increased sequence coverage to…

Does Oral Sex Confer An Evolutionary Advantage? Evidence From Bats

Regular readers of this blog know that while I think studying animal cognition, behavior, and communication is (sometimes) fun and (always) interesting, the real importance - the why should I care about this - is because by understanding animals, we can attempt to learn more about ourselves. I've written about this before. Here are the relevant excerpts: When human adults show complex, possibly culture-specific skills, they emerge from a set of psychological (and thus neural) mechanisms which have two properties: (1) they evolved early in the timecourse of evolution and are shared with other…

Mickey Feels Your Pain (In His Brain)

From the archives... Figure 1: Does Mickey feel empathy? It probably depends on how you define empathy. Empathy, by any definition, implies emotional sensitivity to the affective state of another. Sometimes the empathy response is automatic or reflexive, like when babies start to cry upon hearing another baby crying. Sometimes a strong cognitive component is required, such as for compassion. A more specific understanding of empathy requires similarity between the affective states of the observer and the observed, with an understanding that the observer feels a certain way because he has…

Intelligent Design : a trap for Christians

Intelligent Design is cleverly designed. Much of what I say here will apply to almost any other religious tradition in the modern world. I refer specifically to Christianity for three reasons. First, it's the most dominant religion in the USA, which is where I am. Second, I'm a Christian myself. Third, a form of Christianity is the religious tradition followed by those who designed Intelligent Design. However, whenever I refer to Christians or Christianity, I am aware that it could easily apply to many other religions. Consider the situation many people find themselves in. They are…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Just what acupuncture needs. Holograms. And more quantum.

It's been a bit of a depressing week. I suppose it's not any more depressing than usual, with the usual unending stream of pseudoscience, quackery (particularly of the Ebola type), and, of course, antivaccine nonsense to deal with. Then, as I'm writing yet another in a long line of unfunded grants, I find out that a foundation—and an anonymous foundation at that!—has donated close to $4 million to an "integrative oncology" practice in Ottawa affiliated with a naturopathy school to study "integrating" quackery with science-based oncology. At first, I was thinking that I'd just do an…

Reaction Times and IQ Tests

The following is a guest post by Stephanie Zvan. In this post, Zvan addresses a recent study of "reaction times" and IQ measurements in two study groups distinguished by race. I'll let the post speak for itself, but it is worth nothing that in the ongoing discussion of race and intelligence, the complaint is commonly made that critiques of mainstream psychometrics do not pay much attention to the recent literature. This would be a case of that not happening. Reaction Times and IQ Tests Stephanie Zvan In the ongoing discussion about disparities between racial classifications on IQ tests…

Reef Madness

For Darwin's Birthday Weekend, a reposting of my review of David Dobb's Reef Madness: Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral is a book about the origins of modern science, the interplay between theory and empiricism, the machinations of the Victorian scientific gentry, epic rivalries, polyps and plankton. Reef Madness is by David Dobbs, of Neuron Culture here on Scienceblogs. Look for an upcoming Bloggingheads.tv discussion between David and me, mainly about this book. This is a book about the competing theories presented by Alexander Agassiz and Charles…

More legal thuggery, this time against Neurodiversity.com

Your Friday Dose of Woo has been interrupted to bring you an important rant. The previously scheduled installment will be delayed and will appear later on in the day. This is more important. A common characteristic of cranks and denialists, be they antivaccinationists or large corporations or whatever, is an intolerance of criticism for their views. All too frequently, this has taken the form of the abuse of the legal system in order to try to silence their opponents. The Society of Homeopaths did it to a blogger a while back. A quack by the name of Joseph Chikelue Obi did it to the same…

Still more evidence that supplements probably don't prevent cancer after all...

After a bit of ranting earlier this week, I thought now would be a good time to cool it down a bit, if only for a moment. There's plenty more out there to rant about, but I'm intentionally ignoring it, if only for a day (or even half a day). If there's one thing I've learned about blogging in the three years I've indulged in this little habit of mine, it's that a blogger has to mix things up. Too many rants in a row, and even I start to get bored. And if I'm bored you're almost certainly bored. We wouldn't want that, now, would we? So it was with great interest that I came across, albeit…

A tragic as yet unexplained death, exploited by antivaccinationists

As I noted a few days ago, the antivaccine fringe suffered a major setback in the House of Representatives when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, canceled a previously promised hearing about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, even after it had reached the stage of representatives from the antivaccine Canary Party giving a briefing featuring a boatload of misinformation about the NVICP and the Vaccine Court. Never let it be said, however, that the antivaccine movement can't pivot on a dime to latch onto the latest bit of…

Get taller, get bigger, get tighter, get it all!

Last week was kind of a downer. Oh, sure, I had some fun with choice idiocy by Mike Adams. its posts about murder and attempted murder of autistic teens and the whitewashing of the murder of Alex Spourdalakis by her mother and caregiver, which led to antivaccinationists complaining to my cancer center again. So the last few days have been a fairly unrelenting downer. That's why I was highly amused to see something called Get Tall 1000. There are so many things about Get Tall 1000 that are completely hilarious (if you're a skeptic) that it's hard to know where to start. I mean, the claims for…

Fighting back against animal rights extremists

Here we go again. One of the greatest threats to biomedical research, in the U.S. at least, is the truly crappy research funding environment, a situation that hasn't been this bad for at least 20 years. Labs are closing; investigators are giving up; and fewer of our young best and brightest are interested in a career in biomedical research. However, there are other threats. Although they're not as big a threat in the US as they are in Europe, animal rights activists have nonetheless managed to intimidate scientists here, harass idealistic young students interested in a career in science in a…

Pharma hit squads vs. "holistic healers": The resurrection

As a skeptic, I can't help but taking an interest in conspiracy theories. The reason, of course, is because behind virtually every commonly accepted pseudoscientific and antiscience ideas there is conspiracy theory. For instance, in the case of the antivaccine movement, the conspiracy theory is that some combination of the CDC, big pharma, and the FDA is conspiring to hide the truth—excuse me, The Truth—that vaccines cause autism, brain damage, autimmune disease, diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, shaken baby syndrome, and whatever other disease, injury, or condition that antivaxers like…

The Tolkienian War on Science*

When I was a little kid, I frequently snuck into my older brother's room and read his collection of science fiction books and pulp magazines (see previous post on SF&F books). My mother, who was (and is) a big fan of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (a lovely book and recommended) thought I might benefit from reading some fantasy so she bought The Hobbit for me when I was 12 (6th grade; 1966, yes, I am that old) which I happily read. My brother, who was a college student at the time, then brought home The Lord of the Rings in 1968, and I devoured it. I re-read The…

Elder Care vs. Child Care: Which Would You Rather Talk About?

The whole month of October has gone by, and none of the things I promised myself I would finally get around to writing about this month have appeared on my blog. They haven't even made it out of my cranium into rough draft form on my computer. I didn't even manage to get a post up exhorting you all to open your wallets for the good cause of DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge (though there's still one day left should you be so inspired!) I managed somehow to get my giving page set up (and a few of you stumbled across it and donated, with absolutely no help from me - bless your hearts…

How the Texas Board of Ed. misrepresented a Nobel Prize winner

In November, the Texas Board of Education met to consider their new science standards. As I've mentioned a major point of contention is a reference in the current standards to "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific explanations, a concept only ever applied to evolution, and without any clear explanation of what it means. In the course of 6 hours of testimony, witnesses constantly asked what these "weaknesses" were, and got no clarity. Finally, at an ungodly hour, Cynthia Dunbar (the one who thinks public schools are evil and that President Obama is a s3kr1t Mussulman) gave her explanation…

The future of human evolution

Since The Origin of Species was published 150 years ago many articles on evolution are seeing the light of day today. Normally I'm all in favor of this, I ♥ evolution. But it also means that woolly thinking is put out there as conventional wisdom as journalists simply act as stenographers for any scientist who's in their rolodex. Some of the quotes in this National Geographic article make me want to tear my hair out. Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist, decides to offer up his opinions as a population geneticist: "Everything we know about evolutionary change suggests that genetic…

Does extra data always get you closer to the truth?

As expected, Derek Lowe has a thoughful post (with a very interesting discussion going on in the comments) about the latest "Expression of Concern" from the New England Journal of Medicine about the VIGOR Vioxx trial. To catch you up if you've been watching curling rather than following the case: A clinical study of Vioxx was performed, resulting in a manuscript submitted to NEJM by 13 authors (11 academics and two scientists employed by Merck). The study was looking at whether adverse gastrointestinal events were correlated to taking Vioxx. During the course of the study, other events in…

Honesty about sex is going to disqualify a lot of professors of Catholic dogma

Kenneth Howell was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. He is not being rehired at the end of his contract, apparently because he has been accused of hate speech against gays by a student. He had written an email to his students defending the Catholic position on homosexuality, and a friend of one of the students wrote to the university and the media accusing the professor of "hate speech", of "indoctrinating students", and "limiting the marketplace of ideas". I hate to say it, but I think the student was wrong. I read the professor's email, and I don't think it is hate speech…

I'm proud to be non-human

Here's a dilemma: I think Ron Numbers, the philosopher and historian of science, is a smart fellow and a net asset to the opposition to creationism, and I agree with him that a diversity of approaches to the issue is a good thing. My opinion could change, though, because I am experiencing considerable exasperation with the apologists for religion on the evolution side, and this interview with Numbers isn't helping things. Here's an example of the kind of nonsense that drives me nuts. QUESTION: Are scientists in general atheistic? MR. NUMBERS: The public often gets the impression that most…

Not just a river

Chris Mooney has been hard at work lately, through his journalism, his blogging, and his podcast at the Center for Inquiry, trying to understand why denialism is so pervasive. In the new issue of Mother Jones, he lays out some of "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science": an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has ...demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find…

Todd Wood talks sense

First, my very favorite creationist in the wide world has an appropriately snarky (but optimistic) take on a new ID journal. He opens by noting, "The last time ID supporters tried their own journal was PCID, which seemed to whither and die five years ago." Indeed, they appear to have been unable to generate sufficient submissions to even complete their final volume. I and others have taken this as a sign of the intellectual vacuity of ID. Even their own house organs cannot manage to maintain an appearance of vibrant research. And what papers they generate are simply absurd. But Wood, a young…

Rebecca Watson's Skepticon talk is NOT an example of science denialism

I was recently pointed to this post by Edward Clint which purports to show Rebecca Watson using the 5 tactics of science denialism during her talk "How Girls Evolved to Shop" which was critical of evolutionary psychology at Skepticon. I watched her talk, found it entertaining, informative, wondered why I haven't been invited to Skepticon, and I found I agreed with many of her examples of really bad pop psychology nonsense that's filtered into the media through both scientists, press-release journalism, and marketing disguised as science. In particular the "pink is for girls" idiocy, which…