pseudoscience
scientificactivist | July 18, 2007A few months ago, my boss (a professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford) received a strange package in the mail, unsolicited. It contained a rather large and colorful book that was quite stunning in appearance. Inside, though, spread across hundreds of color-illustrated pages, was one man's case for creationism: an absurd, unconvincing, misguided, and fundamentally unscientific argument. We passed the book around in the lab, admired its aesthetic values (and the unimaginable expense surely incurred in producing it), and then forgot about it. My boss is out of the lab for…
clock | July 12, 2007Echidne, Amanda Marcotte, Laelaps and Larry Moran beautifully destroy the "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature" article from the recent issue of 'Psychology Today', the latest garbage from the Evolutionary Psychology crowd. Much fun was had by all....
voltagegate | July 11, 2007Found this on Google Vids this morning. It features all the regulars in the discussion - Miller, Dawkins - but to me, this doc is valuable and distinct because it features David Attenborough opining on ID and the neocon's dismissal of science, a man who has, for the most part, kept his opinions about this sort of thing to himself over his long career.
As an aside, damn American broadcasting. This is the third doc that has been produced for the BBC that I've wanted to watch for a while and couldn't until it was released online (the other's were A Short History of Disbelief, which I never…
jlynch | July 6, 2007In the past, ID supporters have not only attacked evolution, but also the link between AIDS and HIV (witness Phil Johnson, Tom Bethell, and Jonathan Wells) and anthropogenic global warming (witness the expectorations of Dave Springer - a.k.a. DaveScott - over at Uncommon Descent). Now, it appears that perpetual motion (and the apparently DOA Steorn Orbo project) "is perhaps the best physical evidence I have ever seen against the absurd assumptions of materialism." Perhaps we now need to teach the controversy within physics?
The money quote:
These clever Irish researchers have demonstrated…
clock | June 30, 2007It's been a while since I last blogged about the Bosnian Pyramid (I did follow the story superficially, though, but was sick of trolls attracted to the topic), but I have to break the silence for this piece of good news:
The Culture Ministry found the "research" conducted by Osmanagic's team to be questionable and the collaborators of Osmanagic to lack the credibility needed to allow for continued funding of their "project." Also criticized by the Bosnian government, according to Javno, is the methods by which Osmanagic et al presented their findings, particularly the fact that they routinely…
clock | June 8, 2007I often blog about malaria because it is a fascinating disease which has to be studied in a highly integrative manner, is a great teaching topic and I could tie it in with my own field.
If you share my fascination, than your Obligatory Reading Of The Day is this post by Bug Girl (via) about the truth about DDT, Rachael Carson, malaria and the wingnut lies about it. Follow the links within it as well for more information.
voltagegate | June 8, 2007A friend just shot me a link to a Flickr set of pics from the Creation Museum complete with witty commentary. Absolutely mind boggling. Over and over. PZ has a link to the blog post.
I wish I could ride triceratops.
jlynch | June 1, 2007Over at Denialism, Mark neatly outlines Alexander Cockburn’s descent into crankdom regarding global warming, a descent that neatly illustrates the clarity of Mark’s crank HOWTO (which predates his exposure to Cockburn’s droolings - I know as it was I who tipped him onto them).
Update (6/2): Tim @ Deltoid catches Cockburn in the quote mine.
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…
clock | May 8, 2007It could be the seasonal use of pesticides, as this study suggests, or it could be seasonality in nutrition of mothers and infants, or seasonality of environmental stressors, or seasonality of mothers' hormone profiles. Most likely all or most of these and other factors play a role, and the relative importance of the factors differs between geographic regions, between socioeconomic strata, and between times in history.
But there is one factor that has been repeatedly demonstrated to play no role at all: the position of planets, moons and stars, as seen from Earth, at the moment of birth of…
clock | May 1, 2007How does one fisk a medical quackery when there is no attempt whatsoever to explain what it is all about - not even a string of New-Age mumbo-jumbo, nonsensical, vaguely English-sounding words. All it says is: Buy The Book. Yeah, right...
Related: Circadian Quackery
clock | April 6, 2007My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science"
Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…
clock | March 31, 2007I really did not have time to follow up on the whole case, but Alun has so check out his latest.... And you can always be up to date by following the postings on the APWR Central blog. I wish the whole thing was just an April's Fool joke, but unfortunately, it is just one's fool's joke that threatens to destroy some real archeological treasures in the region.
clock | March 23, 2007Chris and Mark Hoofnagle have recently started a new blog - Denialism.com which I warmly recommend.
Wanna know what denialism is? Check out their definition, or even better, their article: The Denialists' Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts
clock | February 15, 2007Remember this, and use it next time you are debating religion, politics or pseudoscience:
"....someone wearing nothing but a Peter Gibbons-esque cheerful smile and having nothing but kind words for anyone will always be wrong if he says 2 + 2 = 5, and that if I call him a douchebag on wheels and use terms like "donkey punch" in the course of correcting him, it doesn't change who is right; it just changes the input into the popularity contest...
clock | February 4, 2007Alan Sokal (famous for attacking the Lefty postmodernist abuse of science in the 1990s) and Chris Mooney (famous for attacking the Republican War on Science in the 2000s) sat down and wrote an excellent article in LA Times that came out today:
Can Washington get smart about science?
The article gives a historical trajectory of the problem, how it moved from political Left to the Right and what the new Democratic Congress is doing and still can do to bring back the respect for science, or for that matter, the appreciation for reality (which, no matter what the Bushies wish, they cannot make…
jlynch | February 2, 2007A couple days back I passed a link on to Orac regarding the International Alchemy Conference to be held in Vegas this coming October. Now he's gone and devoted his Friday Dose of Woo to it, so wander on over and take a read.
clock | January 24, 2007I love it when Archy blogs about mammoths and the latest post is perhaps his best yet!