bad science
pharyngula | January 30, 2014When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they'll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they'll photoshop my head on to it.
Rhawn Joseph's latest struggle: he's suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity…
pharyngula | November 29, 2013Last year, the Elsevier journal Food and Chemical Toxicology by Gilles Seralini and others that purported to show that rats fed genetically modified corn were more prone to get cancer. The cranks loved it; Mike Adams thought it was great, it was touted on the Dr Oz show (I don't know why they were concerned; these are the people who think cancer can be cured with herbs, urine, and drinking hydrogen peroxide).
But right from the beginning, scientists were appalled — not by the conclusion, but by the incredibly shoddy protocol used by the researchers. Biofortified went through the paper, step…
pharyngula | November 7, 2013Last month, I wrote about the terrible botch journalists had made of an interesting paper in which tweaking regulatory sequences called enhancers transgenically caused subtle shifts in the facial morphology of mice. The problem in the reporting was that the journalists insisted on calling this a discovery of a function for junk DNA — the paper itself said no such thing, but somehow that became the dominant message of the popular press coverage. Strange. How did that happen?
So Dan Graur wrote to the corresponding author to find out how the junk crept in. He found out. It's because the author…
pharyngula | November 3, 2013I've had, off and on, a minor obsession with a particular number. That number is 210. Look for it in any review of evolutionary complexity; some number in the 200+ range will get trotted out as the estimated number of cell types in a chordate/vertebrate/mammal/human, and it will typically be touted as the peak number of cell types in any organism. We have the most cellular diversity! Yay for us! We are sooo complicated!
It's an aspect of the Deflated Ego problem, in which scientists exercise a little confirmation bias to find some metric that puts humans at the top of the complexity heap.…
pharyngula | November 1, 2013He's persistent, I'll say that for him. I first encountered Mark McMenamin as an enthusiastic promoter of Stuart Pivar's inflatable donut model of development. He then sank from sight, along with the pretentious septic tank salesmen, until two years ago, when he presented piles of ichthyosaur vertebrae as evidence that a giant cephalopod, a kraken, had been creating Mesozoic art by arranging the disks into a self portrait.
You may laugh now.
He presented at the Denver GSA meeting this year. Here's his abstract.
THE KRAKEN'S BACK: NEW EVIDENCE REGARDING POSSIBLE CEPHALOPOD ARRANGEMENT OF…
pharyngula | October 8, 2013James May, one of the presenters on Top Gear, is trying his hand at providing a little science education. I want to say…please stop. Here he is trying to answer the question, "Are humans still evolving?" In the end he says the right answer — yes they are! — but the path he takes to get there is terrible.
It's little things that make me wonder if anyone is actually editing his copy. For instance, he helpfully explains that you, the viewer, were produced by your parents having sex. Then he says:
That's how evolution is driven: by reproduction. But is that still true?
Uh, yes? We haven't…
pharyngula | October 4, 2013John Bohannon of Science magazine has developed a fake science paper generator. He wrote a little, simple program, pushes a button, and gets hundreds of phony papers, each unique with different authors and different molecules and different cancers, in a format that's painfully familiar to anyone who has read any cancer journals recently.
The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable. Submitting identical papers to hundreds of journals would be asking for trouble.…
pharyngula | September 1, 2013I wish I knew what it was about the appeal of evolutionary psychology that makes otherwise intelligent people promote outright silliness in its defense, but here comes Jerry Coyne again in a poorly thought-out piece. He disagrees with the anti-EP piece I linked to yesterday, which is fine, but I expect better arguments than this. He completely mangles the story.
An example: he cites a section of Annalee Newitz's story like this, as the one substantive argument she presents against EP:
Humans evolve too fast to bear behavioral traces of ancient evolution.
I agree. That statement is total…
pharyngula | August 15, 2013In science, there's data, and there's interpretation. It's really easy to collect data (usually), but interpretation is the hard part — it requires an understanding of context and theory, and an appreciation of the real complexity of the problem. It's tempting to simplify all your models — the spherical cow problem — but you also have to justify the reduction in complexity to show that it is reasonable. And that's where some papers blow a hole in their foot. This is particularly a problem when the interpretation of the science is used to argue for policy changes.
Here's a paper that's a…
pharyngula | August 9, 2013
I had a conversation with Tony Ortega about L. Ron Hubbard's book, A History of Man: Antediluvian Technology. He is the author of a blog, Tony Ortega on Scientology, and he had cruelly sent me a copy Hubbard's book specifically to inflame my already enlarged outrage gland.
The post there emphasizes everything Hubbard got wrong about evolution, but let me tell you: there isn't much evolution or history of Man in History of Man. The bulk of this book, written in the preening style of a pretentious fourth-grader, weebles on and on about his tech and how it can cure cancer, illuminated with…
pharyngula | August 7, 2013You know I was really pissed off at the crap ENCODE was promoting, that the genome was at least 80% functional and that there was no such thing as junk DNA. And there have been a number of better qualified scientists (like W. Ford Doolittle and Dan Graur and many others) who have stood up and registered their vehement disagreement with that nonsense. But there are some who agree that the genome must be largely functional, like John Mattick. Larry Moran reminds me that Mattick is the author of this infamous chart, however, which is best known as the original Dog's Ass Plot.
That is so…
pharyngula | August 6, 2013It's shark week. I'm not going to watch a bit of it; I'm actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special "documentary" on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot long shark that went extinct a few million years ago…or at least, that's what the science says. The show outright lied to suggest that Megalodon might still exist somewhere in the ocean.
None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved…
pharyngula | July 15, 2013I have disturbed and distressed Jerry Coyne, because I have dissed the entire field of evolutionary psychology. I find this very peculiar, because in my field, Jerry Coyne has a reputation for dissing all of evo devo, so it can't possibly be that we're supposed to automatically respect every broad scientific endeavor. There has to be something more to it than just an academic defense of a discipline. And there is, unfortunately. Here's his prelude.
I’ve been known for a while as a critic of evolutionary psychology, particularly when it first began as “sociobiology” in the Seventies. At that…
pharyngula | July 2, 2013I know you're thinking we've had more than enough discussion of one simplistic umbrella hypothesis for the origin of unique human traits — the aquatic ape hypothesis — and it's cruel of me to introduce another, but who knows, maybe the proponents of each will collide and mutually annihilate each other, and then we'll all be happy. Besides, this new idea is hilarious. I'm calling it the MFAP hypothesis of human origins, which the original author probably wouldn't care for (for reasons that will become clear in a moment), but I think it's very accurate.
A list of traits distinguishing humans…
pharyngula | June 22, 2013Cystic Fibrosis is a serious genetic disorder caused by the inheritance of a defective transporter protein. It leads to an accumulation of mucus and fluids in the lungs that can cause progressive scarring and damage to the tissue, and eventually loss of so much lung function that respiration is inadequate, and the victim dies. It's a terrible disease, and it's in the news today because a ten year old girl just received a lung transplant to deal with CF.
If you want to learn more or do more, read the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website. That's a reasonable source of public health information.…
pharyngula | June 11, 2013Lehrer has landed a new book deal. This has sparked justifiable disgust: Maria Konnikova explains why.
Lehrer is not the writer who simply made up a few Bob Dylan quotes and self-plagiarized (the way he’s portrayed in recent accounts of his latest book deal). He is the writer who got the science wrong, repeatedly, who made up facts, misrepresented information, betrayed editors, and lied, over and over and over again, for many years, in multiple venues, not just in a single book. He is, in other words, the writer and journalist who went against the basic tenets of the profession, and did so…
pharyngula | May 26, 2013We may have the answer to all of the big problems in physics! Or not.
My money is on "not".
Marcus du Sautoy, a very smart mathematician and the fellow who occupies the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford formerly held by Richard Dawkins, made a stunning announcement.
Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I've known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he'd been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see…
pharyngula | May 8, 2013He has a new movie coming out this summer, After Earth. It looks awful, but then, that's what I've come to expect from Will Smith's Sci-Fi outings.
Jebus. Anyone remember that abomination, I, Robot? How about I Am Legend? I steer clear of these movies with a high concept and a big name star, because usually what you find is that the story is a concoction by committee with an agenda solely to recoup the costs and make lots of money…so we get buzzwords and nods to high-minded causes and the usual action-adventure pap. Just looking at the trailer, I'm getting pissed off: it's supposed to be a…
pharyngula | April 28, 2013I think BAHFest — the festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses — has been made entirely redundant. It's an event to mock the absurdly adaptationist hypotheses put forward by some scientists, and it's intended to be extravagantly ridiculous. But then, you look at some ideas that are inexplicably popular among scientists, and you realize…it's a little too close to reality.
I'm speaking of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.
The Guardian is running yet another article on the goofy idea that we evolved from swimming apes, and that all of the unique features of our species are a product of adaptations to an…
pharyngula | April 27, 2013Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn't the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It's hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance.
I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman…