Skepticism
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2007
Norwegian medical doctor Ståle Fredriksen offers a refreshing perspective on healthy living. In his opinion, our thinking about illness is still largely ruled by old superstitions where what happens to a person is somehow just what he or she deserves. If the neighbour has a heart attack, we will semi-unconsciously think that he should have taken more exercise, eaten less fatty foods and smoked less. All these things might have saved him. But Dr Fredriksen's point is that for each person who lives in a certain way and has a heart attack, there are hundreds who live in exactly the same way, or…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2007The Sage of Brooklyn, Jim Benton, returns with a guest entry after months of blogging silence. This piece originally appeared as a two-part comment on Debunking Christianity.
I am both an agnostic and an atheist. You see, I make a distinction between a 'deistic God' (i.e, a 'Creator') and a 'theistic God' (i.e., one which has in some way interacted with humanity, who has communicated with us.) As for a deistic God, there are three main possibilities:
The Universe is self-existent.
The Universe was created by someone who is himself self-existent.
The 'demiurge' hypothesis: the Universe was…
pharyngula | February 12, 2007I've never heard of her before—I guess you have to be familiar with the routine quackery of the health food store to know of her—but she certainly sounds like a real piece of work. The Guardian has an entertaining exposé of her claims and her tactics. She's one of those people who makes extravagant claims for dietary supplements that she sells, backing them up with loads of pretentious and utterly bogus pseudoscientific gobbledygook.
She says DNA is an anti-ageing constituent: if you "do not have enough RNA/DNA", in fact, you "may ultimately age prematurely". Stress can deplete your DNA, but…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2007Repatriation and reburial are large concerns these days for museums with a colonial past. Human remains looted from Aboriginal Australian cemeteries were for instance recently repatriated from a Swedish museum. But not only indigenous peoples in the usual sense of the word are making demands. The Guardian reports that British neo-Pagans are increasingly starting to demand reburial of prehistoric human remains. These adherents of newly constructed paganesque belief systems claim a special affinity with, and thus right to, the remains of selected ancestors.
I don't think neo-paganism is any…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2007Here's a must-read for anyone interested in the integrity of science, in the face both of post-modern hyperrelativism and of politically motivated distortion. It's a succinct op-ed in the L.A. Times co-written by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and Alan Sokal, the man who killed pretentious post-modernism with his 1996 hoax paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Say Mooney & Sokal:
"... we propose a combination of political activism and institutional reform. Congress needs to establish safeguards to protect…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2007
Dear Cultists, welcome to the Temple of Godlessness that is Aardvarchaeology. I will be your High Priest this evening, introducing the latest and greatest blog writing on the subject of Above Us Only Sky. Sisters and brothers, let us pray.
Austin Atheist sets the spotlight on an atheistic writer in an Austin newspaper who, having recovered from religion, found that "nonreligious life is rich with morality". Not to mention rich with hedonistic pleasures, one might add.
Shalini at Scientia Natura refutes the arguments of a Mr Kook regarding whether the Bible is scientifically accurate.
Jake…
pharyngula | February 2, 2007That Dilbert guy, I don't envy at all. The Bad Astronomy guy, maybe a little bit. He's got a clip of his appearance with Penn and Teller now, in which he rebuts the moon landing conspiracy theorists.
Of course, the real reason we know the moon landings were faked is that if they'd actually landed there, they would have sunk into 50 feet of soft and fluffy moon dust and never been seen again. Plait never answers that one.
tsmith | January 31, 2007I suppose everyone has someone who they consider an embarrassment to their alma mater. I can probably think of a dozen just off the top of my head regarding my undergraduate institution (including a number of politicians who shall remain nameless). However, one who really sticks in my craw is the infamous Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute, who also happens to be a Yale alum (Divinity school--small comfort that it wasn't Yale College, at least).
So, Wells has been back polluting Yale lately, via the Opinion pages of the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News. Predictably, Wells…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007This odd duck, discovered by Phil, has an amazing theory, which is his:
Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: This is because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people's blood and the biological movement of life. It has been proven that if magnetism, anywhere, exceeds 1,000 gauss, which equals one tenth of a tesla, it affects the ability of the hemoglobin in the blood to carry oxygen to the body's tissues, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.
Interviewer: In other words, the ability to live…
Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: Yes, to live… This means is that when you are in…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2007
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2006 were announced yesterday. (See also the 2005 awards.)
Professor of international healthcare Hans Rosling receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... for his enlightening efforts to spread a fact-based picture of the state and development of the world, particularly as regards the link between popular health and global economy. Hans Rosling is co-founder of the non-profit foundation Gapminder, that has produced software to visualise and compare statistics from various countries, making it comprehensible and available to anyone."…
tsmith | January 4, 2007I ran across this story study linking breast cancer protection to housework while browsing Scienceblogs briefly over the break (GrrlScientist mentioned it here), but hadn't had a chance until now to read through the actual publication. As usual, I'm late; Orac has a good overview, as well as some comments made by other bloggers railing against "feminism" and how this study proves that feminist philosophy kills women.
First, here's how the BBC story describes it:
Women who exercise by doing the housework can reduce their risk of breast cancer, a study suggests.
The research on more than…
tsmith | January 3, 2007It's a new year, and it will be a busy one here in Iowa when it comes to evolutionary biology. I want to highlight two upcoming events: Iowa City's first annual Darwin Day celebration featuring a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci, and an upcoming symposium on evolution and intelligent design, featuring John Haught and Wesley Elsberry. These events will be held in February and March, respectively; more information on both of them after the jump.
Event Number One: Iowa City's First Annual Darwin Day Celebration
About: A celebration of science in general and biology specifically, with events…
pharyngula | December 9, 2006This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra's endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I'm sure, though, that he'll find other things to babble about.
In this one, he claims he's going to deal with objections that people have brought up to his previous inanity; he doesn't, really, and the few things he does choose to highlight expose the fact that he hasn't been listening to the criticisms. He only makes four rather incoherent points.
Chopra has claimed that Dawkins believes in a purely random universe,…
pharyngula | December 8, 2006Via Byzantium's Shores, I have learned that there will be a Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon on 20 December, the anniversary of his death. I notice there's also a Skeptics' Circle scheduled for the 21st at Humbug! Online…there are opportunities for some synergy here!
tsmith | December 7, 2006Aka, the 49th Skeptics' Circle, and it's a serious piece of work. Even if you don't normally hit the carnival links, you really oughta check this one out--I don't even want to think about how much time was put into this one.
pharyngula | December 4, 2006Oh, man: this is classic crank pseudoscience:
The heretofore unknown science of "earthing", patented by Clint Ober, is that your body needs to be earthed so that you can have the earth's antioxidizing flow of free electrons to go through your body and extinguish free radicals.
Earthing Axiom:
The earth's infinite supply of free electrons will neutralize free radicals in your body and will thus help to stave off disease and aging. YOUR BODY WAS DESIGNED TO BE IN CONTACT WITH THE EARTH FOR MANY HOURS PER DAY.
Being connected via our barefeet to the earth appears destined to provide us with many…
pharyngula | December 2, 2006Sometimes, I get something other than hate mail from creationists—I get crank mail, too. I got a letter recently from Lin Liangtai, asking me to help disseminate information about his amazing paleontological discoveries. He has photos of what he calls a 300 million year old penis, along with other organs.
There are also close-ups of sectioned material: it quickly becomes obvious that anything that has a vaguely circular profile is called a cell, and anything with a reddish tint is called blood, and anything with that elongate anteater look is a penis (they apparently did not practice…
pharyngula | November 22, 2006This is exactly what I want: in his last will and testament, Jim Anderson has bequeathed his brain to me. He left lots of other stuff to other people, but clearly I'm his favorite because I got the best part.
I sure hope it's shipped express overnight. Five-day delivery could get…unpleasant.
pharyngula | November 19, 2006You may vaguely recall that Deepak Chopra claimed the results from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) labs supported his religious ideas. In a very timely bit of news, Jeffrey Shallit reports that PEAR is closing after 27 years of embarrassing futility. About time.
pharyngula | November 14, 2006This could be a lively free-for-all: we've got one commenter who was visited by Steve Irwin's ghost, another who believes in astral projection, and now Deepak Chopra claims to have 'proof' of an afterlife. I think that, by the mystic Rule of Threes, that requires that I respond, so let's take a look at Chopra's seven pieces of evidence for an afterlife.
1. Near-death experiences. Thousands of patients have died, almost always from heart attacks, and then been resuscitated who experience some aspect of the afterlife. One Dutch study put the percentage at around 20% of all such cases. Amazingly…