bad science
pharyngula | December 4, 2016There was a conference sponsored by the Royal Society last month, titled New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives. There have been a number of news stories about this event, some good, some bad. Here's one: can you tell what's wrong with it?
For example, speaking at the Royal Society was Melinda Zeder, who talked about the way in which modern synthesis fails to provide a reason for mankind’s turning to agriculture 10,00 years ago and its ensuing evolutionary impact. Growing crops may have taken years, so there could not have been a short-…
pharyngula | November 29, 2016The crackpots are bustin' out all over -- not just in politics, but also in science. Remember Stuart Pivar? The septic tank tycoon who invented a whole new theory of evolution and development that he called Lifecode, built entirely around imaginary drawings of how embryos formed by folding and stretching themselves like balloon animals? It was total nonsense. There was no data. Much of his imagined topological transformations contradicted known embryological patterns, and he'd clearly never looked at real embryos. It was loosely based on structuralism, like the work of D'Arcy Thompson, which…
pharyngula | July 17, 2016Back around the 11th of July, I saw a few comments by a guy named Myles Power, a science youtuber, who was quite irate that Rebecca Watson criticized evolutionary psychology five years ago. There were the usual vaguely horrified reactions implying how annoying it was that some mere communications major would criticize an established, credible, true science like EP, and how she was prioritizing entertainment over scientific validity (not all from this Power guy; Watson is a magnet for the same tiresome bozos making the same tiresome complaints). So I told him that no, her criticisms were not…
pharyngula | June 26, 2016Neil Shubin reports that Bible tracts have begun appearing in copies of his book, Your Inner Fish, in bookstores. He even has photographic evidence.
This is remarkable news. We now know how bible tracts are made: they are degenerate forms descended from more complex and sophisticated texts, and they appear spontaneously when two pages, who love each other very much, are pressed together. They're kind of like coke cans that way, arising without human intervention.
Oh, except that you'd have to be an idiot to think that.
The thing is, we know how coke cans (and bible tracts) are made: these…
pharyngula | March 19, 2016
Imagine all the poor transhumanists who were born in the 19th century. They would have been fantasizing about all the rapid transformations in their society, and blithely extrapolating forward. Why, in a few years, we'll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you'll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we'll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code…
pharyngula | March 17, 2016 Robin Loznak
This morning, I read a pile of bullshit about Tyson written by an anti-intellectual reverse-snob -- he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel…
pharyngula | March 8, 2016The story should begin with the victim. This is Kim Suozzi, 23 years old, and diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer that was going to kill her within a few months. She's doomed and she knows it, so she has gone to Alcor, signed over her life insurance money, and asked to have her head frozen after death in the unlikely hope that someday, someone will be able to revive her. I feel a deep sadness for her; for someone so young, for anyone, to be confronted with an awful mortality is tragic.
She did die too soon after this video was made. And now we learn about the bumbling corpse mutilation…
pharyngula | March 4, 2016That paper that cited the Creator for designing the hand has been retracted. The authors say it was a translation error -- that they assumed that "Creator" was synonymous with "nature" in English, and apparently, they weren't aware of the potential for willful misinterpretation of the word "design" in the creationist community. I can sort of accept that, except, of course, that they managed to write an entire complex technical paper on the physiology and anatomy of the hand in fluent English. I wouldn't have expected a retraction, though, but only a revision of an unfortunate mistake.
Except…
pharyngula | January 31, 2016It's easy to find lists of dumb things creationists say, and I'm familiar with that lot, but here's a fun new time-waster: Things Anti-Vaxxers Say. Here's a beautiful example of something I've rarely seen so clearly stated: they get the facts totally wrong, actually the reverse of the actual situation, but nope, that doesn't stop them from inventing a bogus rationalization around them.
You can do your own research but it comes down to chromosomes -- the X chromosome is shaky, and boys have two of them. So they are quite literally twice as likely as girls to be adversely affected by genetic…
pharyngula | January 29, 2016
Last week, Simon Davis wrote to me with questions about this cryonic brain preservation technique, which has now been published as How to Freeze Your Brain and Live Forever (Maybe). Unfortunately, my comments did not make it into the story, because, Simon politely explained, there are length restrictions and perhaps, I assume, also because my extended dismissive scorn does not translate well to polite journalism. And that's OK! Because I have a blog, and I can rant here!
The Brain Preservation Society has a goal: to preserve dead brains today, so they can be reanimated at some distant time…
pharyngula | January 28, 2016In a recent quack conference, Deepak Chopra did his usual thing: taking new science that he understands poorly and stuffing it full of magic bogosity.
According to Chopra, that pesky inflamed microbiome is sentient. The genome, microbiome and epigenome, which the author collectively calls the “super gene,” are referenced throughout the interview. His book, Super Genes: The Key to Health and Well-Being, was published last year.
Oh, no! Every time I use the bathroom, I am slaughtering billions of sentient beings? I'm going to have to stop pooping.
…frequent criticism doesn’t seem to deter…
pharyngula | January 14, 2016Well, cool. You can download Judy Wilyman's anti-vaccination thesis from the University of Wollongong and read it yourself. So click, click, wait a second, and…
YAAAARGH! My eyes! I thought the social sciences side of the academic world would possibly have higher standards for writing than the science side, but no…it's awful. This should have been shredded, and Wilyman told to go back and start all over.
I got a few pages in and couldn't take it anymore. Helen Harris managed to read the abstract, and ripped it apart line by line. Orac read some more bits; would you believe she's criticizing…
pharyngula | January 12, 2016Once more unto the breach in Perry Marshall's cranium, dear friends. He is once again trying to claim that he alone has the one true understanding of Barbara McClintock's work, and he keeps getting it wrong. It's just embarrassing to watch.
He makes obvious statements like this:
Damage is random. Repair is not.
Well, duh. If the cell were to just go charging in and practice excision repair (a process that snips out a short piece of one strand of DNA and brings in polymerase to re-synthesize it) on random stretches of DNA, it would increase the frequency of errors. Polymerase proofreads as it…
pharyngula | December 18, 2015
Nick Matzke has just published a very amusing analysis of American anti-evolution efforts. Evolutionary biology has all these tools that allow one to, for instance, assemble trees demonstrating lines of descent for molecular characters, which are ultimately just strings of letters. And what is a law but a string of letters? We can relatively easily map out patterns of similarities and differences, and catalog which bill was modeled after which other bill.
So Matzke put together the history of creationist efforts to adapt their legal strategies.
The analysis of dozens of bills introduced in…
pharyngula | December 6, 2015
A couple of years ago, I wrote a rebuttal to a crackpot claim for the origin of humans, which I called the MFAP Hypothesis. "MFAP" is short for "monkey fucked a pig", which actually pretty much summarizes the whole idea. Eugene McCarthy (no, not that Eugene McCarthy) assembled a list of superficial similarities between humans and pigs -- hairlessness, protruding noses, "snuggling", that sort of thing -- and concluded that a miscellany of appearances overwhelmed the actual genetic relationships and the absence of a feasible genetic mechanism to permit human-porcine hybridization to lead to…
pharyngula | December 6, 2015Davies is up to his same old nonsense again: he's in Australia, lecturing people about his theory of the causes of cancer.
Seven years ago, the National Cancer Institute in the US asked Professor Davies to use his insight as a physicist to look at cancer. His conclusion is that most cancer biologists are thinking about the problem the wrong way.
Rather than treat cancer as a disease of cell mutation, he and his colleague Dr Charley Lineweaver at the Australian National University have developed what they say is a new theory of cancer that traces its origins to the dawn of multicellular life…
pharyngula | December 4, 2015I got a begging email from our good friends at the Center for Science & Culture. They're going to have to work a lot harder to persuade me.
Dear PZ:
Wait. Dear PZ? I'm having a tough time imagining any of those bozos addressing me as dear. But let us continue.
Intelligent design is a common sense idea. Research has shown that children intuitively recognize design in the world around them. You and I make design inferences every day. It has taken a long time for the scientific community to catch up with the kids. But that day is coming.
Intuitive and "common sense" assumptions are often…
pharyngula | November 2, 2015
Jonathan Marks has written a terribly wrong-headed article -- it's embarrassingly bad, especially for someone who claims to be writing popular anthropology articles. He's adamant that humans aren't apes. He's not denying evolutionary descent from a common ancestor, he just seems to fail to understand the nature of taxonomic categories.
What are we? We are human. Apes are hairy, sleep in trees, and fling their poo. I should make it clear: Nobody likes apes more than I do; I support their preservation in the wild and their sensitive treatment in captivity. I also don't think I'm better than…
pharyngula | November 1, 2015
Ecologist Ellis Silver says…hang on. Who? Anyone can call themselves an ecologist, so it's strange that when I tried to find out who this guy is, no one is saying. Try it. Google the phrase "ecologist Ellis Silver, and that association is everywhere -- some even refer to him as "leading ecologist" or "important ecologist" -- and many also call him "Professor Silver". "Professor" implies a university affiliation, but they never bother to state where he's employed as a professor. It's a mystery.
This cipher of a human being is saying something, as I was about to mention: he's claiming that he…
pharyngula | September 17, 2015
He has announced that Dr. Mehmet Oz is changing the direction of his show! No more quackery for him!
The entire upcoming season of The Dr. Oz Show — which kicks off Monday, September 14 — will focus on the mind-body connection and feature a partnership with former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD.
In the past, Dr. Oz has come under fire for the advice given on his show. Now, the newly focused program will use medical and other experts whose advice is based in research.
Orac is not impressed. Neither am I. It'll take a sustained improvement in rigor before I'll believe it.…