bad science

A paper that made extravagant weight loss claims for green coffee beans has been retracted. This study had been touted by Dr Oz, of course -- no fraud is to ludicrous for him -- and rebutted by Scott Gavura, and I'm generally suspicious of any dietary supplement that promises weight loss without reducing calories or increasing exercise. But there's one bit that surprised me. The study was done in India by a guy named Mysore Nagendran, and it was sponsored by Applied Food Sciences, Inc. (AFS), the company trying to exploit this Miracle Weight Loss Supplement. They couldn't get it published,…

A guy named Andrea Rossi has been promoting this device call the E-Cat that produces huge amounts of energy by nuclear fusion: specifically, that it fuses hydrogen and nickel to produce copper and energy. And now there is a claim that this amazing result has been verified, in a remarkably gushing and credulous review. I am not a physicist, not even close. I am at best a moderately well-read layman. I also understand the general principles of fusion -- it's how stars work, it's how heavier elements have been built up over the history of the universe from lighter ones. I might be willing to…

That atavistic cancer hypothesis is actually fueling the work of quacks: Orac has been getting threats from a Frank Arguello, who runs a crank cancer mill called "Atavistic Chemotherapy". It's amazing stuff. It goes on and on about how cancer represents a reversion to the old cell types of single-celled organisms, and how modern chemotherapy is useless and dangerous, so he has a better formula: safe, harmless, and revolutionary. You'll never guess what it is. He's treating cancer patients with antibiotics. The drugs used in combination have been selected based on the principles of "Atavistic…

I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions. In particular, I focused on someone named R.B. Kerr, who had at least a 25 year history of writing letters and articles for eugenics journals,…

Vestigial organs are relics, reduced in function or even completely losing a function. Finding a novel function, or an expanded secondary function, does not make such organs non-vestigial. The appendix in humans, for instance, is a vestigial organ, despite all the insistence by creationists and less-informed scientists that finding expanded local elements of the immune system means it isn't. An organ is vestigial if it is reduced in size or utility compared to homologous organs in other animals, and another piece of evidence is if it exhibits a wide range of variation that suggests that those…

That's my hypothesis, and I'm sticking to it. My obnoxious, curmudgeonly ways must be an adaptation, selected by evolution over many generations to optimize my mating opportunities by forcing stupid people to flee from my presence. Hey, that's as good as the explanation that PMS evolved to drive away infertile mates, don't you think? I wonder if I can get it published somewhere. But no! Bethany Brookshire and Rebecca Watson have ruined it all for everyone by exposing the fallacious reasoning behind my argument! See, this is why everyone hates the uppity ladies.

The anti-vaxxers are excited. A recent paper, Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data, claims that there is evidence that vaccinations cause autism. Only one problem: it's a crappy paper. Orac has covered it to an Oracian level of detail, so let me give the short summary: The author, Brian Hooker, is unqualified. He is trained as a chemical engineer, although he now has a position as a biologist in a nursing program at a Christian college. The journal, Translational Neurodegeneration, is a new something-or-other with…

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on Vandana Shiva, a crusader against GMO crops. I'd never heard of her before, but apparently she has charisma and cult-like followers who hang on her every word, and her word is a rather religious opposition to scientific agriculture. Weirdly, I can agree with some of it. At each stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the…

I think the engineers are just trying to wind me up, again. Joe Felsenstein tackles a paper published in an applied physics journal that redefines evolution and tries to claim that changes in aircraft design are a good model for evolution. It's a terrible premise, but also, the execution is awful. But permit me a curmudgeonly point: This paper would have been rejected in any evolutionary biology journal. Most of its central citations to biological allometry are to 1980s papers on allometry that failed to take the the phylogeny of the organisms into account. The points plotted in those old…

Dr Gijsbert Stoet thinks we should stop trying to correct gender disparities. Speaking at the British Education Studies Association conference in Glasgow on Friday, he argued: "We need to have a national debate on why we find it so important to have equal numbers. Do we really care that only five per cent of the programmers are women? "Well, actually, I don't care who programmes my computers. A wealthy, democratic society can afford to let people do what they want. "What is better? To have 50 per cent of female engineers who do not really like their work but say, 'Yeah, well, I did it for the…

I've been following the story of stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells with considerable interest, and there's a good reason for that: from the very beginning, it contradicted how I'd always thought about cell states, and if it were true, I'd have to rethink a lot of things, which was vexing. But on the other hand, empirical results always trump mental models, so if the results held up, there was no question but that I'd have to go through that uncomfortable process of reorganizing my preconceptions. It would be OK, though, because there'd be a great prize at the end.…

World War Z was on the Netflix last night, so I made the mistake of watching it. It was terrible. Spoilers abound, so stop here if you care. The dreadful biology was offensive. Even if the plot were compelling -- it wasn't -- and the actors engaging -- they weren't -- it would have driven me bughouse mad. As it was, this looked like a movie in which someone had a CGI routine to render frenzied mobs, and they just had to use it over and over again. The central macguffin of the plot was to find Patient Zero of the zombie plague. Why, they don't explain; it would be scientifically interesting…

I don't even… I have roused the furious slap-fighting anger of the HBD crowd, that's for sure. They have now come up with a priceless argument to refute everything I've said, and are accusing me of being a creationist. This image is priceless. Yes, @pzmyers, by definition, is a creationist. Why does PZ hate Darwin so? This must be a doozy of a refutation, encapsulated in a single image. And here it is. The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real. Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.…

I've been getting lots of email and twitter remarks from the HBD mafia -- they don't seem to realize that I don't have any respect for a gang of pseudonymous incompetents, and that they're in a clique of self-deluded racist twits. You want to see real tribalism in action, there's a group that demonstrates it beautifully, driven by one primitive tribal distinction, race, to constantly affirm to each other that they are right to reinforce their prejudices. I'd rather read what real anthropologists -- you know, professionals who have wrestled with and studied this specific problem deeply -- have…

Two more meaty reviews of his li'l book of racism: One by Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist who debated Wade, and the other by Jennifer Raff, yet another anthropologist with expertise in genetics. I’ve focused a lot of this review on numerous technical details because I think that it’s very important that non-geneticists understand the degree to which Wade is distorting the results of recent research on genome-wide human variation. I won’t speculate whether this distortion is deliberate or a result of simple ignorance about genetics, but it is serious. There is a great deal more in this book…

We all know about Mike Adams, notorious quack, conspiracy theorist, quantum dork, and raving nutball around here, right? If nothing else, you must have enjoyed Orac's regular deconstruction of his nonsense. Jon Entine has published a profile of Mike Adams in Forbes magazine that distills all the lunacy down to a relatively concise summary. For instance, it documents his recent public obsessions.Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being…

A confession: I have long disliked Nicholas Wade's science journalism. He has often written about biology in the NY Times, and every time he seems to make a botch of the reporting, because he actually doesn't understand biology very well. For example, in his very last article for the NYT, he described some work that identified 12 genes found on the Y chromosome that are globally expressed — they aren't just involved in testis development, for instance. This is no surprise. There are genes required for sperm differentiation found on autosomes, for instance, and the Y chromosome is not a…

You know what is really impressing me about Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos? That he doesn't hesitate to draw connections between science and how we live our lives — there is an implicit understanding that science has become fundamental to how we see the universe. Last night's episode was no exception. What started as an explanation for how we know the age of the earth (4.55 billion years), as established by the rigorous measurement of the ratio of lead to uranium in meteorites by Claire Patterson, became an exploration of health and the misuse of science, as personified by Robert Kehoe.…

Salon sometimes, and with increasing frequency lately, publishes some genuinely pernicious crap. I notice they've been experimenting with click-baity titles and more lists (I am growing to hate lists on the internet), there is more and more gullible religious pandering, and some days I think they're experience huffpo envy -- 'if only we were a little more schlocky and gossipy and threw in some more T&A, we'd get more traffic!' And now they've published some hysterical nonsense about cell phones causing cancer. Apparently there are no editors on the staff with even the slightest bit of…

Yes, it surely does. It reeks. I completely missed this article -- no surprise, it seems everyone did -- titled "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory," by Md. Abdul Ahad and Charles D. Michener, in the Journal of Biology and Life Science, and now you can't read it because the journal retracted it and deleted it. The first sign that something might be off in this paper is the title. "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory"? Seriously? No one even stopped to notice how ungrammatical it was? And then there's the abstract. Darwin‟s Theory is a…