Skepticism
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2007Virginia Hughes -- that bright, lovely and suddenly quite aptly named minion of our Seed Overlords -- has asked me to write something about parthenogenesis. (That's virgin birth, for you non-Greeks.) Now, I don't know anything about biological parthenogenesis. I just suspect that my wife may have that capability, since our daughter looks like a small copy of her with Rundkvist hair. But I can tell you the story behind the Dogma of Virgin Birth.
To a scientifically minded atheist like myself, the whole idea of religious dogmata appears absurd. I have various factual beliefs about the world,…
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2007Today, the Swedish Skeptics Society celebrated its 25th anniversary with an afternoon seminar in Stockholm. I've been a member since 1997, a co-editor of the society's journal Folkvett since 2002 and a board member since 2004. The >2000-member society is Sweden's nearest equivalent of CSI (formerly CSICOP), but it has certain unusual traits. For one thing, its Swedish name, Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning, says nothing about either skepticism nor the paranormal. It simply means "The Society for Science and Popular Enlightenment". (Folkbildning, a word first documented in 1805, is…
pharyngula | November 24, 2007Michael Hanscom gets a very amusing advertisement:
THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESTOSTERONE - The Problem Is That You Are Being Deluged with Female Hormones. You Are Being Feminized and You Don't Even Know It.
It's for one of those fake 'natural male enhancement' products, but it has an interesting premise: that your impotency problems are not your fault, but a consequence of the flood of estrogen entering our drinking water. You need Estro-Blaster to blast the estrogen out of your system. This product looks like total bunkum, but I had to admire the ad copy — if I were a completely unethical, greedy…
denialism | November 22, 2007I watched the season finale of phenomenon - the show in which mentalists compete to see who is the next "phenomenon" - and Criss Angel did skeptics everywhere proud with the contents of the envelope.
You may remember his fight with the paranormal fraud we talked about last time. It started when Angel offered 1 million dollars of his own money to who could tell him what was in an envelope, thus demonstrating their psychic power. The psychic fraud, Jim Callahan, and Uri Geller got all upset and called him closed-minded, yada yada. Good times were had by all.
Luckily Callahan got kicked…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2007Blog carnivals!
The twenty-eighth Four Stone Hearth is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology to a most awe-inspiring extent.
The next open 4SH hosting slot is already on 5 29 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are. And do it NOW.
A very fine Skeptics' Circle may be found at Med Journal Watch. So fine, in fact, that I am on it despite forgetting to submit! Thanks Chris!
And all you biology types, check out the latest Tangled Bank at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.
denialism | November 21, 2007Med Journal Watch has it up.
I must admit some sadness that yet again one of my skeptic colleagues has fallen for Sandy Szwarc's nonsense though. People, figure this out, she's not a real skeptic. They don't make blanket statements like this:
Hearing that a study found some food, exposure or physical characteristic is associated with a 5% to 200% higher risk for some health problem seem like a frightening lot. It's easy to scare people half to death by citing relative risks that sound big but aren't actually viable. Such modest risks (RR=1.05 - 3.0) don't go beyond a null finding by more…
pharyngula | November 20, 2007You've got almost a month to get it together: it's the second annual Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon. Write something in honor of Carl Sagan by sometime around 20 December. This event got a huge response last year — it ought to be possible to top it this time around.
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2007Two months from now I'm going to spend a week on the US East Coast, attending two conferences and doing some sightseeing.
From 18 to 22 January I'll be in the Chapel Hill/Durham area of North Carolina for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference, where I'm co-chairing a session on blogging about the humanities and social sciences.
From 23 to 27 January I'll be in Plantation/Ft Lauderdale, Florida, for The Amazing Meeting 5.5, a skeptical conference hosted by James Randi. I think there's a seat on a panel for me there.
Dear Reader, both of these conferences are looking really good, and I'd love to…
pharyngula | November 16, 2007Enjoy the nice criticism of medical woo.
Sid Schwab takes on the credulity of believers in alternative medicine, like chiropractic.
Ben Goldacre demolishes homeopathy.
aardvarchaeology | November 15, 2007[More blog entries about skepticism, christianity, religion, atheism, jesus; religion, kristendom, jesus, ateism, skepticism, skepsis.]
Guest blogger Jim Benton, scourge of faiths big and small, pokes a few innovative holes in the logical fabric of Christianity.
Introduction -- Joseph, the 'Five Rocks,' and the Problem of Communication.
This article began as a series of four comments at Debunking Christianity in response to the second of a series of essays by a relatively new member named Joseph. Joseph is an ex-minister and counselor in a conservative Christian denomination who had found his…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2007
Welcome everybody to the Carnival of the Godless, a bi-weekly collection of good blogging from a perspective unclouded by notions of friendly guys in the sky who provide pie when you die.
Alexander the Atheist explains why both Christians and the god they worship
>need Satan.
Franklin's Journal tells us why
>Franklin is an optimist.
Austin at About.com gives us a run-down of the various ways in which religion, religious groups, and religious beliefs are privileged.
Aerik at The Science Ethicist relays three Kansan newspaper letters-page entries about atheism.
Greta Christina…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2007Evidence-based medicine, alternative medicine and weaponry change through time because of selection pressure. This means that they evolve and produce a fossil record of discontinued methods and therapies.
Any method or therapy introduced into alternative medicine will face selection pressure from two directions. If a method hurts patients to a visible extent, it will be recognised as weaponry and thrown out of altie medicine. Government regulations will forbid it and the more savvy altie practicioners will soon learn that it leads to nasty law suits.
If on the other hand a method introduced…
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2007Jean François Revel once wrote, "Let there be no discussion about methods except by those who make discoveries".
As may have become apparent at one time or another on this blog, I don't share a number of the ideals prevalent in current academic archaeology in Sweden. Post-modernism has become unfashionable, so my resistance to that movement is no longer very controversial. But my disdain for "theoretical archaeology" is still something that sets me apart from many university-based colleagues. Now, most archaeologists are not university-based, so my opinions are in fact in tune with the…
denialism | November 1, 2007Last week you may remember I watched phenomenon with eye out for Uri Geller's nonsense, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Criss Angel playing the skeptic pretty well.
Well this week's was awesome! Jim Callahan does a pretty cheesy psychic bit, with some really terrible acting, and it's so bad that Angel calls him out. Angel starts demanding he (or Geller) show real psychic ability and if he did he'd give him a million dollars. It ends up with them being physically separated - check it out!
Some spoilers below the fold.
The rest of the mentalism gags this week were more of the same.…
pharyngula | October 28, 2007Halloween is coming, and you can enjoy the haunted house theme of the 78th Carnival of the Godless.The Quackometer tells us that we've been very naughty boys and girls, and of course it's perfectly natural at this time of year to hang around in the Boneyard. That's nothing, however, I have something far more terrifying to show you.
Yesterday, I naively asked how stupid the Discovery Institute thinks people are. This was a mistake. I suspect the Discovery Institute thinks people are pretty darned stupid. Worse, I'm afraid they might be right.
Both Orac and Mark note the recent series of mind-…
denialism | October 26, 2007Both Orac and MarkCC have been having a blast tearing to shreds virtually every aspect of the latest nonsensical piece by Dennis Byrne based on this idiotic study at JPANDS.
One thing struck me in the two analyses, was MarkCC's emphasis on the idea of triage in assessing the scientific literature. This is fundamentally a good concept, but I think he was too kind to JPANDS in saying that they merely lacked credibility as a journal thus raising red flags. If we're going to look at this from the perspective of triage, an article from JPANDS is like encountering a dead body on a gurney…
denialism | October 25, 2007Le Canard Noir scolds me at the Quackometer for the 72nd installation of the skeptic's circle. Check it out!
denialism | October 25, 2007As promised, I watched Phenomenon, and I've got to say, I'm unimpressed. The premise of the show is there are 10 people with paranormal abilities vying for a 250,000 prize (they could make more if they tried Randi's challenge - I wonder why don't they?). The one that impresses the judges - fraud and huxster Uri Geller, and magician Criss Angel - as well as the studio audience who calls in and votes.
Not only are they obviously using simple tricks to pass themselves off as psychics, but they're not even that good at it. Geller, of course, is such a pathetic creep, and acts as if each act is…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2007The Skepticality podcast and Skeptic Mag's web site (9-page PDF file) have picked up on something I wrote on 5 July 2006. Thus, to keep you in the know, Dear Reader, I've copied the entry to Aard as well.
Skepticism, for those of you who don't use the word fifteen times a day, means an unwillingness to believe anything without good reason. These days, it's also an international movement that can be seen as the antithesis of a) New Age, b) pseudoscience. Skeptics don't believe in herbal remedies, astrology, spiritism or self-improvement coaches. But they do believe in rational scientific…