bad science
pharyngula | September 16, 2011Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he's antagonized the agriculture lobby. On a recent show, he claimed that apple juice was loaded with deadly arsenic — a claim he supported by running quick&dirty chemical tests on fruit juices, getting crude estimates of total arsenic, and then going on the air to horrify parents with the thought that they were poisoning their children.
One problem: his tests weren't measuring what he claimed. The FDA got word of the fear-mongering he was doing, and sent him a warning letter.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA…
pharyngula | August 6, 2011Oh, boy. Look at these quotes from a recently published magazine article, and try to guess where they came from.
Scientists had also implicitly assumed that the X chromosomes in all women were identical.
We had? When?
The first comprehensive study of gene activity in the X chromosome of women reveals an unexpected level of variation among individual females. This extensive variation means there is not ONE human genome, but TWO - Male and Female.
This does not follow. There's also individual variation in chromosome 7, and every other chromosome in the genome. Allelic and expression variation…
pharyngula | July 24, 2011It's so good to see someone take off the rose-colored glasses and tell it like it is: the space shuttle was a flop.
The most important thing to realize about the space shuttle program is that it is objectively a failure. The shuttle was billed as a reusable craft that could frequently, safely, and cheaply bring people and payloads to low Earth orbit. NASA originally said the shuttles could handle 65 launches per year; the most launches it actually did in a year was nine; over the life of the program, it averaged five per year. NASA predicted each shuttle launch would cost $50 million; they…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011I've taken a few pokes at the bad science of Rhawn Joseph and the Journal of Cosmology over the years — for instance, in this post summarizing an article that was little more than a thinly threaded excuse to show off pictures of women in bikinis, or this post about their claim to have found bacteria in meteorites.
I think my criticism must have stung.
Check out the bikini post at the Journal of Cosmology now. It's been removed, with the disclaimer, "CENSORED This Article Has Been Censored and Removed Due to Threats and Complaints Received." I am amused. I wouldn't take all the credit, since I…
pharyngula | June 17, 2011Jonathan MacLatchie, the creationist who challenged me to answer his questions about development in Glasgow, has posted his account of our encounter and his problems with evolution. It is completely unsurprising — he still doesn't understand any of the points.
Of his 10 questions, 7 were quickly dismissable and were more than thoroughly addressed in my talk. They rest on a deep misconception that is shared with Jonathan Wells and many other pseudoscholarly creationists; I can summarize it with one standard template: "Since Darwinian evolution predicts that development will conserve the…
pharyngula | June 16, 2011The Geological Society of America is the major national professional organization for geologists, and they recently had a meeting in Denver where, in addition to the usual scientific meeting stuff, they did what geologists do for fun: they took organized field trips to look at local rocks. Among these trips was a tour of the Garden of the Gods Natural Landmark in Colorado Springs, which sounds quite nice, except for one thing: it was organized by a team of young earth creationists who were attending the meeting, and they didn't tell anyone. They were quite careful to hide their agenda.
Many…
pharyngula | June 14, 2011Not again. Oh, no, not again. It's more garbage from the Journal of Cosmology, with an article titled Sexual Consciousness: The Evolution of Breasts, Buttocks and the Big Brain. Hang on a moment before you click to rush over there, though. Here's the abstract:
As first proposed and detailed by Joseph (1992a, 1993, 1996, 2000a,b), the evolution of human consciousness is directly related to the evolution of human female sexuality and full time sexual availability signaled by the evolution of a permanent enlargement of the female breasts and buttocks thereby mimicking the signs of estrus in…
pharyngula | June 1, 2011The World Health Organization had a recent meeting in which the feeble data suggesting a possible link between cell phones was reworked and massaged, and have now come up with a press release in which they announce that maybe possibly cell phones could increase the frequencies of certain kinds of cancers. My doubts are massive. My willingness to accept this conclusion is not helped by arguments like these.
"What microwave radiation does in most simplistic terms is similar to what happens to food in microwaves, essentially cooking the brain," Black said. "So in addition to leading to a…
pharyngula | May 28, 2011The scientific animation company, XVIVO, has had their work 'appropriated' by creationists before, and I hate to say it, but there is a reason for it. Although their animations of cellular and molecular processes are spectacular and beautiful, they are also annoyingly purposeful: they show tubulin making a beeline across microns of distance to assemble a microtubule, for instance, while kinesins stride determinedly down the cytoskeleton. There isn't the slightest hint of the stochastic nature of the biochemistry, and they are seriously misleading in that sense — which, no doubt, is why…
pharyngula | May 16, 2011Among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology, one has a name: Satoshi Kanazawa. He has a blog on Psychology Today called The Scientific Fundamentalist, and earlier he published this charming article: Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?. Don't bother trying to follow the link, the article has mysteriously disappeared from the site…although you can still find a copy here, if you really must.
I'm a little surprised that it's gone. After all, Psychology Today had no problem with his loving look at American politics in which he wanted Ann Coulter…
pharyngula | May 11, 2011Mike Adams, the cranky quack naturopath, has been exploring "the field of quantum physics" and "consciousness". He says this in his silly pseudo-documentary, "The God Within", after praising physicists and their selfless search for the truth, all while ghostly equations float by in the video. He does this a lot, panning over equations or showing stock photos of people standing in front of transparent sheets of glass with illegible scribbles all over them; but it's obvious that he doesn't actually understand math, knows nothing about physics, and is just holding this stuff up in front of his…
pharyngula | April 28, 2011The last mission of the space shuttle will contain a student-initiated experiment: a collection of bobtail squid embryos will be launched into space. Which is cool, I suppose. I like squid, I like space, I like science, I like student research, let's just throw them all into one big tossed salad of extravagantly expensive tinkering.
So why am I so disappointed?
Because the experiment is so trivial and uninteresting. The squid Euprymna has a commensal relationship with the luminescent bacterium, Vibrio. Early in their development, special organs in the squid are colonized by the bacteria; the…
pharyngula | April 26, 2011I read this story with mounting disbelief. Every paragraph had me increasingly aghast. It's another case of physicists explaining biology badly.
It started dubiously enough. Paul Davies, cosmologist and generally clever fellow, was recruited to help cure cancer, despite, by his own admission, having "no prior knowledge of cancer".
Two years ago, in a spectacularly enlightened move, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) decided to enlist the help of physical scientists. The idea was to bring fresh insights from disciplines like physics to help tackle cancer in radical new ways.
Uh, OK…I can…
pharyngula | April 20, 2011I am a gorgeous hunk of virile manhood. How do I know? I looked at my fingers.
Research has shown that men whose ring finger on their right hand is longer than their index finger are regarded as better looking by women, possibly because their faces are more symmetrical.
There is no link, however, between this finger length and how alluring women find a man's voice or his body odour, the study found.
Guys, you may be looking at my picture on the sidebar and thinking there must be something wrong here…but no, I assure you, my right ring finger is distinctly longer than my right index finger…
pharyngula | April 11, 2011Here's another one: Lynn Margulis. HIV denial, weird ideas about spirochaetes making sperm tails, dismissing the whole field of population genetics, failing to understand evolution in general…it's embarrassingly bad. Dr Margulis had a weird idea once about endosymbiosis, and she was right — and now she's always off gallivanting towards the latest, weirdest, most untenable idea she can find. It's such a waste.
I think someone should arrange a conversation between Margulis and Wickramasinghe. Their egos will either synergize and produce a spectacular explosion of time-cube level kookiness, or…
pharyngula | April 11, 2011The crackpot wing of the astrobiology community (and I do know, there are rational and scientific members of that group!) has now flowered into full-blown paranoia. N. Chandra Wickramasinghe has published a remarkable paper on arXiv titled Extraterrestrial Life and Censorship, which isn't as much a review of the evidence as a personal recounting of the global conspiracy to silence people who claim to have evidence of extraterrestrial life. It's a bizarre piece of work that has the keywords "Darkâ©Matter;â©Planetâ©Formation:â©Cosmicâ©structure;â©Astrobiology", when it's not really about any of…
pharyngula | March 20, 2011Ooops. Hot off the dramatic fizzle of the bacteria in meteorites story comes word that Chandra Wickramasinghe is losing his job and the University of Cardiff is closing their astrobiology center. Not because they oppose his work, of course, but simply because the weird science isn't cost-effective.
It turns out it was a pretty rinky-tink operation to begin with. All it was was Wickramasinghe, getting paid a part-time salary of $24,000/year, with a little unpaid assistance from other people working at the university. In other words, the Astrobiology Center of the University of Cardiff was…
pharyngula | March 17, 2011Martin Nowak has written a peculiar paper, recently published in Nature, in which he basically dismisses the entire concept of inclusive fitness and instead promotes a kind of group selectionist model. It's an "analysis" paper, and so it's rather weak on the evidence, but it also seems mostly committed to trashing the idea that inclusive fitness models are the whole of selection theory, which is a bit weird since no one argues that. Jerry Coyne and others will be publishing a critique next week, which should be fun.
I would like to draw your attention to a different kind of critique, though.…
pharyngula | March 16, 2011Jesse Bering disappointed me recently. He started off another evolutionary psychology story with this warning.
Consider this a warning: the theory I'm about to describe is likely to boil untold liters of blood and prompt mountains of angry fists to clench in revolt. It's the best--the kindest--of you out there likely to get the most upset, too. I'd like to think of myself as being in that category, at least, and these are the types of visceral, illogical reactions I admittedly experienced in my initial reading of this theory. But that's just the non-scientist in me flaring up, which, on…
pharyngula | March 10, 2011I don't believe one word of this study that claims staring at breasts improves longevity. It doesn't make sense, the evidence can't support it, and the methodology is dubious.
A rather bizarre study carried out by German researchers suggests that staring at women's breasts is good for men's health and increases their life expectancy.
According to Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist and author of the study, gawking at women's breasts is a healthy practice, almost at par with an intense exercise regime, that prolongs the lifespan of a man by five years.
She added, "Just 10 minutes of…