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J.J. has a chance to live!

Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…

Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!"

He's baaaack. Deepak Chopra. Remember him? It's been a while since I've said much about him and him alone. True, I've gone after him this year when he joined up with three other major league woo-meisters Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil to try to try to help Senator Tom Harkin hijack the health care overhaul bill currently before Congress. However, given that a couple of years ago, Chopra was the man for whose abuses of quantum theory, evolution, and "universal consciousness" ideas I coined the term "Choprawoo" and the only response ever needed to Choprawoo, it's been a while since I…

An "un-American suppression" of antivaccine views or good reporting?

I've been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the "antivaccine dogwhistle." In politics, a "dog whistle" refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can't be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone is higher than the range that humans can hear, most people don't "hear" the real message. However, the intended audience does hear the real message. The way the "dog whistle" works in politics is through the use of coded language recognizable to the intended audience but to which most other people…

Dr. Aviva Romm: Distancing herself from Goop after defending it

It's been over a month now since I started paying real attention to that wretched celebrity hive of scum and quackery founded by Gwyneth Paltrow known as Goop. It was a long time coming, and I feel a bit guilty for not really paying much attention to the "wellness," "lifestyle," and, of course, expensive quackery being sold by Paltrow and her minions through Goop. It began when Goop caught flack for selling pricey magic energy healing stickers. Well, it wasn't so much for that as much as for the amusing intervention of NASA, which slapped down Goop's claims that these stickers were made with…

Will Tipper Gore be appearing at a fundraiser hosted by antivaxers?

I hesitated over discussing this story because it only comes from one source and that source is not one that I normally trust, The Washington Free Beacon. It might be fake news. On the other hand, it is a story that is not implausible and appears to be reasonably well reported, complete with a reproduction of an invitation to the event being reported on. Moreover, even though this particular source is unabashedly conservative and partisan, it has done some reporting that even Nick Baumann at Mother Jones admitted to be pretty good. So it is with a little bit of trepidation that I note this…

The FDA cracks down on bogus cancer "cures." Will this be the last time this happens until after Trump?

I was going to write about this yesterday, but seeing a family of a child with terminal cancer seduced by the siren call of Stanislaw Burzynski and his antineoplaston quackery distracted me and I had to blog about it. It's actually an appropriate lead-in to this story, which was based on an announcement by the FDA that it was sending warning letters to 14 companies for selling products that they claimed were treatments for cancer: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today posted warning letters addressed to 14 U.S.-based companies illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently…

Problems With Teacher Evaluation: The Value Added Testing Edition

One of the supposed key innovations in educational 'reform' is the adoption of value added testing. Basically, students are tested at the start of the school year (or at the end of the previous year) and then at the end of the year. The improvement in scores is supposed to reflect the effect of the teacher on student learning*. I've discussed some of the methodological problems with value added testing before, and the Economic Policy Institute has a good overview of the subject. But what I want to discuss is a very serious flaw--what I would call fatal--with value added testing that stems…

The (Literally) Incredible Iron Man

Tony Stark, the man behind the mask in the blockbuster Iron Man movies, doesn't have any super powers, but he is supernaturally gifted in terms of intelligence, ingenuity, and sarcasm. His most amazing ability, however, may be the ability to make movie audiences suspend their disbelief regarding the science at the heart of his adventures. The hotly anticipated sequel released last Friday taxes those powers to the limit, with Tony building something even more ridiculous than an indestructible flying suit of armor powered by a pocket-sized cold fusion reactor. If you don't mind spoilers, check…

Obama administration's erosion of scientific integrity

My colleague Susan F. Wood had an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend about the Obama administration's overruling of the scientifically grounded FDA decision to approve emergency contraceptive Plan B for over-the-counter sale without age restrictions. She begins by going back in time to a much more promising moment: President Obama's signing of a Presidential Memorandum on scientific integrity: It was a proud moment, in the East Room of the White House, on a beautiful spring day in March 2009. In the room were leading scientists, Nobel laureates, the president's science…

Report: House GOP health care bill would spark job losses, economic downturns across the country

Despite glowing reviews from the House GOP about their health care bill, the people that actually crunch the numbers say it’ll likely mean millions more uninsured and higher premiums for people in poorer health. Now comes more bad news: it’ll also result in more than 900,000 lost jobs and billions in lost state revenue. A new report from researchers at the Commonwealth Fund and George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health calculated the impact of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which House Republicans passed in May, on employment and economic activity in every…

Memorable moments from Labor Secretary’s confirmation hearing

My favorite line from today’s Senate hearing on the nomination of Alex Acosta to be Labor Secretary came from Senator Elizabeth Warren: “The test for Secretary of Labor is not: are you better than Andrew Puzder.” Puzder was Trump’s first pick for the job. He had a long list of problems that made him unfit for the position. So instead of Puzder, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is considering the nomination of Alex Acosta. The 48-year old is currently dean of the College of Law at Florida International University. He also served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At KCRW (an NPR member station), Karen Foshay reports on occupational injuries among low-wage restaurant workers in California and the retaliatory barriers that often keep them from speaking up. She cited a 2011 Restaurant Opportunities Center survey of Los Angeles restaurant workers that found 42 percent experienced cuts, 43 percent experienced burns and more than half reported working while sick. Foshay writes: At a recent meeting in Azusa (in eastern Los Angeles County), several workers showed off their appointment cards for clinics like Santa Adelina. Three men lifted their pant legs to…

Right Wing Political Correctness

Jesse Walker has an essay at Reason that absolutely nails the emergence of political correctness on the right. It's titled Right-Wing P.C.: How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love political correctness. After long denouncing the sort of shallow identity politics so common on the left, conservatives have discovered that there is power in claiming the status of victim. After an amusing introduction in which he said that the right's hatred of political correctness was "a Sam-and-Diane sort of enmity, an animus that could only end with a lusty, guilty romp in the hay", Walker explains…

On Feelings and Votes

This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there's a recurring theme in my recent social media that's really bugging me, and I need to vent. I'm going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and then I'm going to unfollow basically everybody that isn't a weird Twitter bot or a band that I like, and try to avoid politics until the end of the year. Also, I'll do some physics stuff. This morning saw the umpteenth reshared tweetstorm (no link because it doesn't matter who it was) berating people who write about…

The East is Red

Rather appropriately, with all the murk swirling around Trump's ties to the Commies, Judith Curry and John Christy are looking for new sources of income suggesting that Congress fund “red teams” to investigate “natural” causes of global warming and challenge the findings of the United Nations’ climate science panel according to the WaPo. In case you're in the slightest doubt about where La Curry was aiming her testimony, she concludes Let’s make scientific debate about climate change great again. FFS. This, in case you've been asleep, is all in the context of the House Committee on un-…

We're running out of time

The atmosphere is lethal But I will fear no evil Because it's not too late, It's not too late. -- T-Bone Burnett Marvelous musician and cracker-jack producer that he is, (responsible for last year's stellar Alison Krauss-Robert Plant collaboration), T-Bone may be dead wrong when it comes to doing something about the climate crisis. So conclude a quartet of researchers from Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. The problem is, we may have waited too long to start bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions. "Atmospheric stabilization and the timing of carbon mitigation" appears in the…

Strong, Silent Men Wax Eloquent In Print To Refute Mehl Study

You can study it scientifically, gather the data, analyze it, publish it in Science, and have it discussed on NPR. But by golly, if you are asking us to give up cherished stereotypical beliefs about male and female nature, then you can just take your data and shove it, mister! You are wrong, wrong, wrong, because My Personal Feeling About How Things Are says otherwise. This, of course, would be the kind of reaction stirred up by Matthias Mehl et al.'s study Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?, published in the July 5, 2007 issue of Science. Let us consider the abstract from the…

The Limits of Rational Thought

A couple of months ago a friend of mine recommended I pick up Richard Power's new novel The Echo Maker. "It's right up your alley," he said, "It's all about a man suffering from a bizarre brain condition." I added it to my Amazon shopping cart within the hour. In The Echo Maker, Powers' character Mark flips his truck on an icy stretch of road in Nebraska and ends up in the hospital in a near-vegetative state. His sole-remaining family member, his sister Karin, immediately rushes to his bedside to nurse him back to health. Mark remains comatose for long enough that the doctors begin to lose…

I get email

Time for another stream-of-consciousness response to yet another slimy Christian. Interesting blog But I beg for just a few moments of your time. You are obviously an intelligent individual, considering you're a prof and all [Flattery alert: diverting warp power to shields. I can guess how this will end up], but consider this for one second. Could our few years on this planet be all that there is? [Yes.] You are born, live, then die and that's it? [That's what I said. Yes.] All of you loved ones that have died are no more? [What? It's not enough to have lived and to have loved ones? These…

Global Warming Denialism and Bearing False Witness

Both Digby and Amanda Marcotte have been asking why global warming seems to be driving much of the right wing berserk. While I agree that part of the reason is the ever-present desire to punch a hippie in the face, I think Fred Clark at the Slacktivist hits on a key point in these two posts: "It isn't intended to deceive others. It's intended to invite others to participate with you in deception." In the two posts, Clark describes the fervent belief by a considerable number of evangelicals in the belief that the Proctor and Gamble corporation (P&G) was involved in satanic cults, which…

The Economics and Politics of Protecting Miners

Four months ago, Mr. Dale Jones, 51 and Mr. Michael Wilt, 38 were killed in a massive highwall collapse at a surface coal mine near Barton, Maryland.  The two miners were buried under 93,000 tons of rock, and it took rescue crews three days to recover the men's bodies.   This week, MSHA assessed a monetary penalty of $180,000 against the mine operator Tri-Star Mining, Inc.  (Their accident investigation report was issued six weeks ago.)  In a news release announcing the fine, MSHA's Assistant Secretary Richard Stickler said: "Two miners lost their lives because federal safety…

Study: Cuts to Texas’ family planning budget led to more abortion, unintended teen pregnancy

In 2011, Texas legislators slashed the state’s family planning budget by 67 percent. The justification? To reduce abortions by defunding clinics associated with an abortion provider (read: Planned Parenthood). Now, it turns out Texas legislators actually accomplished the opposite: narrowing access to family planning services only led to more unplanned pregnancies and more abortions. In a study that will soon be published in the Journal of Health Economics, researcher Analisa Packham found that in the years following the 2011 funding cuts, Texas’ teen birth rate went up by 3.4 percent, which…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Center for Public Integrity, Jim Morris reports on working conditions at the nation’s oil refineries, writing that more than 500 refinery incidents have been reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994, calling into question the adequacy of EPA and federal labor rules designed to protect workers as well as the public. Morris begins the story with John Moore, who in 2010 was working at a Tesoro Corporation oil refinery north of Seattle — he writes: Up the hill from Moore, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater unit, seven workers were restoring to service a bank of heat…

Dumb America

An unfair headline; but I think it is a known phrase: the "Dumb America" phenomenon, wherein the public has the hubris to believe that they really have something valuable to contribute to discussions that they can hardly begin to understand (I'm assuming that if you aren't part of DA then you're intelligent enough to realise I'm not talking about all Americans). Yes, I'm talking about the comments in Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano by Willis Eschenbach at Wattsup (ht: mt). Incidentally, anyone tempted to complain about my sneering or elitist tone is invited to comment somewhere else. If…

Has Nordhaus changed his mind?

William (good name!) Nordhaus has a new study out. The purveyors of snake oil seek to convey to the impressionable youth that he has changed his mind. However, it is a touch unclear in what manner his mind has change. Let's try reading the abstract: Climate change remains one of the major international environmental challenges facing nations. Yet nations have to date taken minimal policies to slow climate change. Moreover, there has been no major improvement in emissions trends as of the latest data. The current study uses the updated DICE model to present new projections and the impacts of…

BEC: What Is It Good For?

Another response copied/adapted from the Physics Stack Exchange. The question was: What are the main practical applications that a Bose-Einstein condensate can have? Bose Einstein Condensation, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a phenomenon where a gas of particles with the right spin properties cooled to a very low temeprature will suddenly "condense" into a state where all of the atoms in the sample occupy the same quantum wavefunction. This is not the same as cooling everything to absolute zero, where you would also have everything in the lowest energy state-- at the temperatures…

Pay it forward? Cooperative behaviour spreads through a group, but so does cheating

Ever wonder if acts of kindness or malice really do ripple outwards? If you give up a seat on a train to a stranger, do they go onto "pay it forward" to others? Likewise, if you steal someone's seat, does the bad mood you engender topple over to other people like a set of malicious dominoes? We'd all probably assume that the answers to both questions were yes, but James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis think they have found experimental evidence for the contagious nature of cooperation and cheating. The duo analysed data from an earlier psychological experiment by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter…

Cooperating bacteria are vulnerable to slackers

As a species, we hate cheaters. Just last month, I blogged about our innate desire to punish unfair play but it's a sad fact that cheaters are universal. Any attempt to cooperate for a common good creates windows of opportunity for slackers. Even bacteria colonies have their own layabouts. Recently, two new studies have found that some bacteria reap the benefits of communal living while contributing nothing in return. Bacteria may not strike you as expert co-operators but at high concentrations, they pull together to build microscopic 'cities' called biofilms, where millions of individuals…

Is the NCAA encouraging academic fraud?

I'm pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't want college athletes -- or the athletics programs supporting them -- to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn't the best strategy to give the NCAA what it's asking for. From the article: [M]any agree that the climate has changed in college athletics in ways that may make such misbehavior more likely. And it has happened since the NCAA unveiled its latest set of academic policies that raised the stakes on colleges to show that…

I really wish this were an April Fools' Day joke...

...but sadly, it's not. Jenny McCarthy has struck again. Yesterday, given the release of Jenny McCarthy's new book espousing antivaccinationism and autism quackery and the attendant media blitz the antivaccine movement has organized to promote it, I predicted that a wave of stupid is about to fall upon our great nation. Well, the stupid has landed. And how. An interview with Jenny has just been published on the TIME Magazine website in which she "surpasses" herself. In fact, so dense is the stupid emanating from what passes for a "brain" in that empty head of hers that words fail me.…

Phylogeny Friday - 15 September 2006

A few weeks ago I introduced the tree of life, albeit to some criticisms. The following week I zoomed in on one branch of that tree, the eukaryotes. I pointed out that animals were a mere twig in the eukaryotic tree, yet they have been the focus of a large amount of biological research. This disproportionate attention is due in part to our ignorance regarding the majority of eukaryotic taxa. We have only become aware of many of the eukaryotes recently, so we have a lot of catching up to do in order to understand their evolutionary relationships. Because animals are the best studied eukaryotes…

Quoth Richard Dawkins: "I am proud to have presented the [AAI] award to Bill Maher"

It just so happens that I was up quite late last night doing--what else?--writing yet another grant application (well, two actually). Even though the grants aren't due until Wednesday, Tuesday happens to be my operating room day, meaning I need to get this done and buried by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. In any case, I had been planning on just posting a rerun or two, as is my wont when real life gets so crazy that even my rapid-fire blogorrhea is curtailed, and then someone had to go and send me something that merits at least a brief bit of Insolence. Try as I might not to get sucked…

Naturopathic quackery wins licensure in Massachusetts

I was busy last night doing something other than actually blogging. Perhaps I was recovering from the one-two punch of the antivaccine rant penned by the director of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute followed by Donald Trump's meeting with antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Whatever the case I crashed early. However, I can't help but note still more bad news. I woke up this morning to this headline Naturopaths get their own licensing board in Mass.: Governor Charlie Baker on Wednesday signed into law a bill that creates a licensing board to regulate naturopaths, alternative…

The annals of "I'm not antivaccine," part 16: Felonious assault, deadly ordnance, and "vaccine violence," oh, my!

If there's one thing that will annoy an antivaccinationist, it's to call her what she is: Antivaccine. While it's true, as I've pointed out on numerous occasions, that there are some antivaccinationists who are antivaccine and proud, unabashedly proclaiming themselves antivaccine and making no bones about it, the vast majority of antivaccinationists deny they are antivaccine. They frequently retort that they are "not antivaccine" but rather "pro-vaccine safety" or some such dodge. Most recently, we've seen this tack taken by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (and, of course, Bill Maher) himself, the…

Complementary and alternative medicine: The New York Times and the elephant in the room

When I first started blogging, I liked to refer to myself as a booster of evidence-based medicine (EBM). These days, I'm not nearly as likely to refer to myself this way. It's not because I've become a woo-meister of course. Even a cursory reading of this blog would show that that is most definitely not the case. So what's changed? Basically, I've come to the realization that EBM is an imperfect tool. Don't get me wrong, EBM goes a long way towards systematizing how we approach clinical data, but there's one huge flaw in it. (I can just see a quack somewhere quote-mining that sentence: "Orac…

Reason.com defends the medical neglect of Sarah Hershberger

I realize that some of my readers will chide me for saying this, but I usually expect better of Reason. Although I sometimes have a tendency to be a bit—shall we say?—Insolent about libertarians when they pass from a reasonable defense of civil liberties into an Ayn Rand-inspired fantasy world in which the market cures all, useless people keep the supermen (and women) down, and the government is virtually unnecessary, I've usually considered Reason.com to represent a fairly—if you'll excuse the word—reasonable variety of libertarianism. For instance, Ronald Bailey actually once presented…

"Right To Choose Medicine": The free market fundamentalist assault on the FDA continues

Yesterday I discussed a highly unethical clinical trial of a new herpes vaccine, based on what appears to be questionable science but backed by über-Libertarian Peter Thiel. The reason the trial is so unethical is because Rational Vaccines, the company that developed the herpes vaccine and is conducting the clinical trial, not only arranged to carry it out offshore but, unlike all American companies carrying out clinical trials offshore for purposes of gathering data to support an application for FDA approval, Rational Vaccines apparently carried the trial out without any oversight by an…

Oprah and Jenny McCarthy: A woo too far

Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before. It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…

Ethics Questions, dealing with senior researchers

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel, our resident ethicist, has been writing about academic dishonesty and how professional researchers should respond to it. I've been on the receiving end of dishonesty on three occasions - ranging from a trivial case (arguably not dishonest at all) to the profound. I'll describe my three experiences, along with how I did respond to them, and how I could have responded to them. Unfortunately, my experience isn't very encouraging, and most of my advice comes down to: always, always keep a paper trail: it can't hurt, but don't count on…

Ferreting out how swine flu crowds out seasonal flu

Yesterday one of the questions we asked was whether swine H1N1 would replace seasonal viruses this season. In previous pandemics one subtype completely replaced its seasonal predecessor: in 1957 H2N2 replaced the H1N1 that had been coming back annually at least since 1918; only 11 years later, in 1968, a pandemic with H3N2 replaced the H2N2. H2N2 is no longer circulating but in 1977 an H1N1 returned and has been co-circulating with H3N2 since then. This was a new situation. We could ask why this hadn't happened before with H2N2 and H1N1 or H2N2 and H3N2 or all three together; or we could ask…

Improving chemical safety: Better band-aids or systemic change?

“If you don’t understand why something is harmful, the best you can do is stay away from it,” Paul Anastas said to me a few years ago, explaining the basis of the United States' risk-based chemicals management policies. “We currently deal with chemical security through guns, guards and gates rather than by redesigning materials,” continued Anastas, who directs Yale University’s Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering and served as Assistant Administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development from 2009 to 2012. “Protection measures…

When manatees crossed the Atlantic

No time for anything new (working on a book chapter and putting the finishing touches to the Tet Zoo book), so here's this, from the archives. NOT properly updated, so please be aware that it's more than four years old... There are three extant manatee species*: Trichechus inunguis of the Amazon Basin, T. manatus of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and US Atlantic coast as far north as Virginia, and T. senegalensis of western Africa. So, how it is that they occur on opposite sides of the Atlantic? [West Indian manatee T. manatus shown here, from wikipedia. This one was photographed in Florida…

Are parrots actually pigeons?

Historically, an apparent absence of transitional forms has made it difficult to reconstruct the evolutionary affinities of the different modern avian 'orders'. As you'll know if you've been keeping up with the results of the various big molecular and morphological analyses - and who hasn't - the avian cladogram is gradually coming together, though areas of debate and disagreement remain. One of the most vexing areas has been the origin of the parrots, or psittaciforms. An idea frequently mooted in the ornithological literature is that parrots are close kin of pigeons and doves - the…

Public health officials call on HHS to restore grant funding for preventing teen pregnancies

In July, public health departments across the country got a letter from the Trump administration abruptly cutting off funding for teen pregnancy prevention efforts in the middle of the program’s grant cycle. The move means that many teens will miss out on receiving an education that could — quite literally — change the trajectory of their lives. The abrupt funding cut — which came down without reason or explanation, according to grantees — also cuts off research efforts right at the evaluation stage. That’s the stage when public health practitioners rigorously assess a program’s outcomes,…

Admissions Is a Hard Problem

There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of "Affirmative Action for Men." The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student she had rejected: Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they…

On Faculty Mentoring

One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty "mentoring." It's rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn't about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that: Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise. — Chad Orzel (@orzelc)…

Statue of Liberty, White Supremacy, and the Immigrant Question

The truth about the Statue of Liberty and that poem and everything. The Statue of Liberty has been a symbol of American openness to immigration since it was built. However, modern White Supremacists want us to believe it was something else. I found one example of that on the Internet, writtne by Hunter Wallace with the tags “Identity” and “The Jewish Question,” and titled “David Brooks: The Great War for National Identity”: …millions of Jews came to the United States during the Great Wave. Much of the early 20th century is the story of how these Jews rose from working class occupations into…

Is it appropriate to use the term "Pygmy" when speaking of...Pygmies?

Left: Efe (Pygmy) man. Right: White guy. Some of the people who live in the rain forest of Central Africa are known widely as "Pgymies." That word...Pygmy...is considered problematic for a few different reasons. It refers to a person's physical appearance, because it means "small." The word is sometimes used in biology to refer to the smaller species among a group of closely related species, as in "Pygmy Hippopotamus" or "Pygmy Chimp." In English and probably some other languages, the term is used in a derogatory way to refer to someone who is perceived as not very smart, as in "Pygmy…

Scalia

I spent this weekend playing in the annual chess extravaganza known as the US Amateur Team East (epic blog post to follow). On Saturday night, I was having dinner at an excellent Japanese restaurant with some of my teammates. One of them, who happens to be a lawyer, had his phone out and said, “Hey, you know who just died?” Since he knows the kinds of things I'm interested in, I was afraid he was going to say Richard Dawkins, who recently had a minor stroke. But then he said, “Scalia.” Now, this particular friend is supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary, so that at least suggests he…

Miller, Giberson Spank Back

If you saw my post the other day about Jerry Coyne's review of the recent books by Ken Miller and Karl Giberson, then you might also be interested to know that Miller and Giberson have now replied. Click here for Miller's reply, and click here for Giberson's. Let's look at Giberson, first: Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly. But empirical science also trumps other empirical science. Einstein's dethronement of Newton was not the wholesale undermining of the scientific enterprise, even though it showed that science…