bad science
pharyngula | September 14, 2015
Kevin Folta, a critic of the Food Babe, has been sent a list of demands for his email correspondence under the Freedom Of Information Act. I'm all in favor of transparency, and I can see where FOIA requests can be used to uncover conspiracy or expose intent, but this is a case where Folta has been outspoken and up-front: he thinks Vani Hari is a quack. You don't need a shadowy paymaster and ulterior motives to explain why a scientist would publicly explain that someone said something that is scientifically wrong.
I also don't need to rifle through her correspondence to figure out why she's…
pharyngula | September 12, 2015I must have been taking a nap a couple of years ago. I just found this interesting discussion of EP by a psychologist, and I agree very much with it.
Evolutionary psychologists believe that the human mind works much like the body… that it is an information-processing system, with pre-specified psychological programs (or environmentally-triggered ones), adapted much like the rest of the body, to meet specific problems in our evolutionary past. Others, including myself, disagree with this definition of the human mind. While I would certainly agree that evolution had a profound role in shaping…
pharyngula | September 11, 2015I quite annoyed one of the authors of that "Kill All The Predators argument, who butted heads with me on Twitter and told me I had to go read this longer essay by Jeff McMahan which would address all my objections, because philosophers all seem to think that if they can babble long enough, they'll ultimately be persuasive. Spoiler alert: it just made the problems with their idea wordier.
In particular, I was told to read section 3 and 4, which deal with objections to their argument. So I'll just address that bit here, because I think their defense is dead with the second sentence.
The…
pharyngula | September 10, 2015
A couple of vegetarian philosophers with no knowledge of biology are alarmed…no, horrified at what's going on out there in the wilderness.
The animal welfare conversation has generally centered on human-caused animal suffering and human-caused animal deaths. But we’re not the only ones who hunt and kill. It is true (and terrible) that an estimated 20 billion chickens were born into captivity in 2013 alone, many of whom live in terrible conditions in factory farms. But there are estimated 60 billion land birds and over 100 billion land mammals living in the wild. Who is working to alleviate…
pharyngula | September 9, 2015
If ever I run out of creationist pseudoscience (it will never happen), I can always turn to another source, the Men's Rights movement, especially their radical anti-woman wing. Here's a prime example from RooshV: Research Suggests That A Woman’s Body Incorporates DNA From The Semen Of Her Casual Sex Partners. Would you be surprised if I told you that everything in that title is wrong? Would you be shocked to learn that everything Roosh concludes from misreading that research is also wrong?
The above study has two seismic implications. The first is that a woman can absorb enough DNA during…
pharyngula | September 5, 2015Tom Harkin is a toxin in the bloodstream of American science. Watch this report on his legacy: billions of dollars swirling down the drain of alternative medicine.
pharyngula | August 15, 2015
First thing when I landed at SeaTac: it started raining, as I'd hoped.
Second thing at the airport: we were taking a shuttle bus, and this guy started talking at his friend. I learned many things.
It's obvious that cell phones cause cancer. They radiate energy. Energy causes cancer. QED.
The only reason we don't have proof is that all us old guys use them sparingly. Just wait: a few more years, and all those kids going around with phones glued to their head will be getting brain cancer! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
The best part: he got sort of quantitative. At low energies, they don't cause…
pharyngula | August 14, 2015
Jebus. The stupidity of the media is maddening. Here are two articles now out there: Don't freak out, but scientists think octopuses 'might be aliens' after DNA study and Octopuses ‘are aliens’, scientists decide after DNA study. These reporters are embarrassing.
Not to freak you out or anything, but scientists have just revealed that octopuses are so weird they’re basically aliens.
The first full genome sequence shows of that octopuses (NOT octopi) are totally different from all other animals – and their genome shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes…
pharyngula | August 5, 2015
I used a cruel headline, but this is actually a useful list: Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. It's not just the popular media that mangle scientific language, but also more technical works sometimes slip into misleading shorthand. For instance, #1 on their list of bad terms:
(1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997).…
pharyngula | July 29, 2015
Oh, joy. Deepak Chopra is mad about being called an evolution denialist, and to disprove the accusation, he fires back with a whole long letter full of misconceptions about evolution. As usual, he relies on painting himself as the brave pioneer at the very edge of science, with a hooting mob of regressive scientific dogmatists haranguing him.
…in a recent blog, Valerie Strauss goes beyond catcalls, accusing me of being an evolution denier, which is absolutely false. I work and write with high-level scientists, including physicists, geneticists, and others who believe, as I do, that…
pharyngula | April 6, 2015 Zana's granddaughter
Does the London Times routinely publish crackpot pseudoscience with no fact checking at all? I've just read their latest piece on the notorious Bryan Sykes, Bigfoot Hunter, and it's the kind of gullible tosh I'd expect from a Murdoch tabloid. It's got one paragraph that mentions that other scientists doubt his findings, but otherwise it's a fluff piece for Sykes' new book about an ape-woman…which is not only inane, but distressingly racist.
Here's the whole article.
It's total crap. Right from the beginning: Now an academic geneticist claims to have found the most…
pharyngula | March 12, 2015I've now read two novel attempts to explain the existence of junk DNA. To a lot of people, the very idea of junk DNA is offensive: whatever process built us, whether divine fiat or the razor-sharp honing of natural selection, must be powerful, omnipotent or nearly so, and incapable of tolerating any noise or sloppiness, especially not to the degree seen in the eukaryotic genome. There is no room for error in design.
There's also a strong whiff of human exceptionalism. Look at us, we're pretty much perfect! Or at least, movie stars and super-models are the pinnacle of creation/evolution. How…
pharyngula | February 17, 2015This is an amazing "discovery"! Someone named JA Tetro has been selling interviews and articles to women's magazines and other credulous sources, claiming that your microbiome is the key to compatibility.
Tetro says that when you kiss your date, his or her germs make their way into your mouth’s ecosystem. And if it’s a match, you’ll want to keep smooching.
This study does one amazing thing, it shows you that kissing is the best way to find a mate for the long term. It might sound really gross but if the bacteria from the other person harmonizes with your bacteria, your immune system is all…
pharyngula | December 30, 2014Since we still have someone arguing poorly for the virtues of the ENCODE project, I thought it might be worthwhile to go straight to the source and and cite an ENCODE project paper, Defining functional DNA elements in the human genome. It is a bizarre thing that actually makes the case for rejecting the idea of high degrees of functionality, which is a good approach, since it demonstrates that they've at least seen the arguments against them. But then it sails blithely past those objections to basically declare that we should just ignore the evolutionary evidence.
Here's the paragraph where…
pharyngula | December 17, 2014Michael Egnor has replied to my dismissal of his claims that memories can't be stored in the brain with a curiously titled post, Understanding Memories: Lovely Metaphors Belong in Songs, Not Science. I was a bit confused, at first…I don't recall using any song lyrics or poetic metaphors in my post on the subject, but then as I read his post, a light dawned. He's talking about himself.
I'm reminded of a phrase from one of my favorite songwriters, Paul Simon, in "The Boxer": "I've squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles."
A lovely metaphor (I lived in New York City at the time…
pharyngula | December 5, 2014He keeps saying the same ol' debunked crap over and over again, and nowadays when a paper comes out that shows he was completely wrong about something, he spins it into a triumphant vindication for his sycophantic fans, who are all, apparently, abysmally innumerate. The hobby horse he's been riding for the past few years is the evolution of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite: he claims it is mathematically impossible. And that's the secret of his success: he dazzles creationists with bad math. Really bad math. The kind of math creationists have been fallaciously using for decades…
pharyngula | December 2, 2014Why, oh why, do EP's defenders rely on throwing up armies of straw men to slaughter? It's silly. Here's how he starts:
There are some science-friendly folk (including atheists) who simply dismiss the entire field of evolutionary psychology in humans, saying that its theoretical foundations are weak or nonexistent. I’ve always replied that that claim is bunk, for its “theoretical foundations” are simply the claim that our brains and behaviors, like our bodies, show features reflecting evolution in our ancestors.
Have you ever seen a critic of evolutionary psychology deny that we evolved, or…
pharyngula | November 29, 2014Chelsea Polis and Kathryn Curtis wrote a paper that asked whether hormonal contraceptives affected your likelihood of being infected with HIV, Use of hormonal contraceptives and HIV acquisition in women: a systematic review of the epidemiological evidence. Here's the abstract:
Whether or not the use of hormonal contraception affects risk of HIV acquisition is an important question for public health. We did a systematic review, searching PubMed and Embase, aiming to explore the possibility of an association between various forms of hormonal contraception and risk of HIV acquisition. We…
pharyngula | November 22, 2014Brandenburg is a physicist who submitted a paper to the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference a few years ago. It's way outside my area of expertise, but it postulated an interesting scenario from the ratios of rare isotopes in the atmosphere of Mars: that there was evidence of a natural nuclear reactor, like Oklo on Earth, that had exploded over 180 million years ago. He makes a good case, at least to this biologist's eyes, and it seems reasonable.
Natural Nuclear Reactors formed and operated on Earth, there is no reason this could not have happened on Mars. Conditions on Mars: lack of…
pharyngula | November 15, 2014Oh, great. Orac just has to tell me that the University of Minnesota is going to host an anti-vaccine conference on 24 January.
First, let me say this, though: they get to do that. Presumably they've rented out (or possibly obtained student or faculty sponsorship) Cowles Auditorium at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and just about anyone can do that. They may be fraggin' morons, but they're part of the public, and it's a public university.
Still, this is painfully stupid and a disservice to the public trust. It's a conference in which a train of pseudo-experts will lie, lie, lie in…