Skepticism
tsmith | May 10, 2006 It's funny sometimes being a Yale graduate with my upbringing--a blue-collar, middle-class kid from rural America. One thing in particular I just never quite got was the whole secret society thing. As such, it's been a bit amusing to see all the attention they've gotten in the years since my graduation. The Skulls came out in 2000, trading on the name of Yale's most prominent "secret" society, Skull and Bones. A few years later, a classmate wrote Secrets of the Tomb, an exposé of Skull and Bones. And then, of course, the Skull and Bones memberships of both George W. Bush (and his…
cmooney | May 8, 2006Well, my last post triggered a lot of comments that raised some very serious issues about science, skepticism, and the upcoming Skeptics Society conference. Some fair points were made (about whether "skeptics" ought to be embracing Michael Crichton), others less fair (slamming Ronald Bailey, who I respect, and who has come around on global warming to a significant extent). I'm in New York at the moment speaking to a class at Columbia, but once I get back and settle down, I just wanted to let you all know that I plan on getting into all of this further....
tsmith | May 8, 2006He's been trying so hard to defend his profession, but it just keeps getting worse. Just unveiled is a brand new "dissenters from Darwinism" list: Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity.
As medical doctors we are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the origination and complexity of life and we therefore dissent from Darwinian macroevolution as a viable theory. This does not imply the endorsement of any alternative theory.
(Continued...)
Compare this to the Discovery Institute's document:
We are skeptical of claims for…
tsmith | May 2, 2006I see that Hank's still touting his "Padian found ZERO seroconversions among 176 discordant heterosexual couples over 6 years" line, even after that study was extensively analyzed here (and his ideas about it were shown to be mistaken). At least he's dropped it from 10 years down to 6 years--progress, I suppose. He's now discussing a new MMR report that documents 88 HIV transmission events over a 17-year period in Georgia prisions. Despite the fact that Hank doesn't dispute that these sexual transmission events occurred (noting that the "infectivity is low, low, low"), Hank still ends his…
pharyngula | April 27, 2006This week's collection of carnivals:
Carnival of the Liberals #11
I and the Bird #22
Skeptics' Circle #33
Carnival of Education #64
Anyone else feel that it's a shame CoE hasn't hit #66 yet?
Otherwise, you got your open thread right here.
tsmith | April 21, 2006Skeptics warn bird flu fears are overblown
Doomsday predictions about bird flu seem to be spreading faster than the virus itself. But a small group of skeptics say the bird flu hype is overblown and ultimately harmful to the public's health.
There's no guarantee bird flu will become a pandemic, and if it does there's no guarantee it will kill millions of people. The real trouble, these skeptics say, is that bird flu hysteria is sapping money and attention away from more important health threats.
While I agree with some points the so-called "skeptics" make (we don't know if H5N1 will become…
tsmith | April 20, 2006Though much of the attention to and reports of intelligent design/creationist shenanigans come from the United States, we're certainly not the only ones inundated with deniers of evolution and other sciences. A self-described UK evolution "sceptic" is journalist Melanie Phillips, who writes for The Daily Mail. She's annoyed many scientists in the country due to her views not only on evolution, but also on vaccination (such as this article from earlier this year), drawing the ire of many who point out that she doesn't understand the underlying science.
She's proven her critics correct…
tsmith | April 19, 2006
Lingerie makes hagglers happy-go-lucky
Quoth the Nature summary:
It seems that the more macho a man is -- at least according to his hormones -- the more the sight of an attractive woman will affect his judgement.
Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium asked men to play an ultimatum game, in which they split a certain amount of money between them. High-testosterone men drove the hardest bargain -- unless they had previously viewed pictures of bikini-clad models, in which case they were more likely to accept a poorer deal.
Okay, so it didn't exactly make them "stupid," as the title…
pharyngula | April 17, 2006It's Pride Week at UMM, so it's timely to mention the dissection of Paul Cameron's latest mangling of science and statistics. Cameron, if you've never heard of him, is an anti-gay bigot who publishes sloppy analyses to 'prove' that homosexuals are bad people, and has recently published yet another of his screeds in the Journal of Biosocial Science.
Apparently, homosexuality is contagious. Am I at risk if I attend any of the gay pride events this week? Will Hedwig and the Angry Inch turn me into a transsexual? Knowing that the author is Paul Cameron reassures me that my wife and I have nothing…
tsmith | April 10, 2006So, Linus Pauling is apparently the hot topic of the day. Janet's already discussed a bit about the whole "wacky older scientist" phenomenon over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, while the first post cited gives you a bit of the background of Linus Pauling, bringing in two new studies on the topic of vitamin C as a treatment for cancer. Since Janet's covered a bit more of the philosophy and sociology of the topic, I just thought I'd weigh in a bit on the science of the issue, particularly since Lee makes it seem as if Pauling has been unfairly maligned.
Here's what Lee claims happened…
pharyngula | April 8, 2006A few months ago, I saw the movie, What the bleep do we know? at the library. I checked it out. I thought it might be worth dissecting for a blog post. I watched it. I wanted to lie down afterwards and pour lye in my ear until it dribbled out my eye sockets, just to scour the stupidity out of my brain. It's this horrible pseudo-profundity delivered by quacks, gladhanding physicists who think being in a movie makes them rockstars, and a dead Atlantean warrior, all stitched together with a boring plot about a deaf photographer searching for meaning in her life. The whole thing was so dreary and…
tsmith | April 7, 2006[This is one from this past December]
My favorite essay arguing against intelligent design isn't one of Gould's, or Dawkins', or Sagan's. Rather, it's one from an essay that has portions I disagree with, but the eloquent prose simply can't be beat:
"The analogy which you attempt to establish between the contrivances of human art, and the various existences of the Universe, is inadmissible. We attribute these effects to human intelligence, because we know beforehand that human intelligence is capable of producing them. Take away this knowledge, and the grounds of our reasoning will be…
tsmith | April 5, 2006...so says scientist.
Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.
The results suggest temperatures dropped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius) during one of the two cold periods 2,500 -1,500 years ago for up to two days, the same decades during which Jesus lived.
With such conditions, a floating patch of ice could develop above the plumes resulting from the salty springs along the lake's western shore in Tabgha. Tabgha is the town…
tsmith | April 4, 2006Busy yesterday and today, but I saw a brief mention of a study yesterday that Orac has discussed in more detail today. The study questions whether an "autism epidemic," as frequently cited in the anti-vaccination literature, has really occurred in the United States or not.
So, in nearly all states, as the reporting of autism cases for special education administrative purposes increased, the reporting of mental retardation and learning disabilities declined correspondingly, suggesting that children who once would have been classified as mentally retarded or learning disabled were now more…
pharyngula | April 3, 2006I am very disappointed. There is this site called How Stuff Works that I've run into a few times, that has nice, short, kid-friendly summaries of, obviously enough, how stuff works. I hadn't used it much, but it seemed like a cool idea…until a reader suggested I take a look at the section on how evolution works.
It's terrible.
The author has a very, very poor understanding of basic biology, and it looks like the essay was simply spun off the top of his head, with a few quick glances at some websites. The author, Marshall Brain, is an electrical engineer and computer scientist, and it shows,…
pharyngula | March 31, 2006The best analysis of American Heart Journal prayer study that I've seen yet is over at Rhosgobel. It uses solid methodology, and its results are clear: prayer didn't help, and might even have hurt.
I've read the paper. It was hard. Every time I saw the word "prayer" on the page (and it's used like several times per paragraph), my eyes would cross and I'd giggle, and then I'd get cranky because millions of dollars were wasted on this stupid, if well done, study. There was absolutely no justification given for this work, other than "Many patients report using private or family prayer to cope…
tsmith | March 29, 2006From this essay (via The Island of Doubt):
Convictions are important things. We do not want our children to have minds so open that their brains fall out. On the other hand, certainty is conviction absent humility. Certainty is intolerant. It is absolute. It knows the answers and will not tolerate disagreement. It is inflexible, permanent and anti-intellectual....
It is the demagogues on both the left and the right who are more interested in advancing their private agendas than in explaining and understanding an entire situation or picture. Their perspective is often, "I know what I know;…
tsmith | March 26, 2006Over at Good math, bad math, Mark has a bit more on mathematical modeling. Before anyone screams "witch hunt," please note:
I'll leave the science debate over at Aetiology, where it belongs. But there's definitely a mathematical aspect to this. Professor Culshaw lends her authority as a mathematician to the HIV denialist folks. Does her math support what she's saying?
Alas, no.
Professor Culshaw is not a bad mathematician - quite the opposite. What I can read of her publications shows very solid mathematical work, done extremely well.
The problem is that when she tries to apply the…
pharyngula | March 26, 2006Here's another bunch who don't understand science: an article on research on prayer. You know, the creationists are always complaining that all those scientists out there (waves hand vaguely towards the nearest university) are biased and reject supernatural phenomena out of hand, and that their weird metaphysical research program can't get any funding. Can we just face the fact that there are plenty of crackpot scientists and sloppy bureaucrats in the world, and that lots of nonsense gets funded and studied?
(More below the fold)
But the most controversial research focuses on "intercessory"…
tsmith | March 24, 2006Via Stranger Fruit:
Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them.