bad science
denialism | September 24, 2012The anti-GMO study released late last week has raised so many bad science red flags that I'm losing count. Orac and Steve Novella have both discussed fatal flaws in the research, the New Scientist discussed the researchers' historical behavior of inflating insignificant results to hysterical headlines. And all this new paper seems to be proof of is that these researchers have become more savvy at manipulating press coverage. The result of this clever manipulation of the press embargo and news-release stenography by the press is predictable. The internet food crackpot army has a bogus…
oracknows | September 23, 2012Ideologically motivated bad science, pseudoscience, misinformation, and lies irritate me. In fact, arguably, they are the very reason I started this blog. True, over time my focus has narrowed. I used to write a lot more about creationism, more general skeptical topics, Holocaust denial, 9/11 Trutherism, and the like, but these days I rarely write about topics that don't have anything to do with medicine. Sometimes, it even seems that I've narrowed my focus to the point that all I write about is antivaccine nonsense. That doesn't mean that I've lost interest; rather it's that over time I've…
pharyngula | September 10, 2012Now he's got a gig at Big Think. Kanazawa, you may recall, is the evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who loves to make racist arguments and then go racing to the data to find selective support for them; he's a terrible scientist. I'm no big fan of evolutionary psychology, not because I think its premises are wrong (evolution did shape how our brains work), but because it is trivially easy to find lazy, bad scientists who have hopped on the bandwagon because it is an easy path to media sensationalism — and Kanazawa is the kibitzer dancing in the locomotive cabin,…
pharyngula | August 29, 2012It's a shame I have to say that right from the beginning.
I'm beginning to develop a distaste for computer models of biological processes, which is a shame. From Andrulis to Fleury to Pivar, the field is tainted with people who don't know a lick of biology but are good at inventing algorithms that go spinning off into never-never land, spawning odd and suggestive shapes that, in their happy ignorance, they assign to real organisms.
The latest is a guy named Eric Werner who, in a surprising change of pace, has a model that does not involve whorls, spirals, vortices, or toroids, the usual…
pharyngula | August 13, 2012There is a magic and arbitrary line in ordinary statistical testing: the p level of 0.05. What that basically means is that if the p level of a comparison between two distributions is less than 0.05, there is a less than 5% chance that your results can be accounted for by accident. We'll often say that having p<0.05 means your result is statistically significant. Note that there's nothing really special about 0.05; it's just a commonly chosen dividing line.
Now a paper has come out that ought to make some psychologists, who use that p value criterion a lot in their work, feel a little…
pharyngula | July 27, 2012I always hear this argument that, well, maybe those herbs and enemas don't help that much, but they don't hurt, and they make people feel better, so get off alternative medicine's back. Right. Because distractions from real medicine don't affect the legitimate work being done.
You might want to read this criticism of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Paul Offit’s editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 2012;307(17):1803-1804.) goes through the history of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(NCCAM) and nicely…
pharyngula | July 19, 2012And credulous newspapers are helping that quack. The latest case is a little girl in Ireland with a disfiguring and deadly rhabdomyosarcoma who is trying to raise money to get the useless and totally fraudulent Burzynski antineoplaston treatment … and this article makes the good point that newspapers are helping to defraud sick people. Both the Irish Times and the Irish Independent reported on the poor girl's struggle, and they called the fake treatment "pioneering" or "advanced".
Each uncritical article published about clinics like the Burzynski clinic amounts to free advertising for a…
pharyngula | July 14, 2012Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that's always on display. Here's all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:
The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.
If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation
It won't. It can't.
I read the paper he recommended: it's by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is…
pharyngula | July 9, 2012No.
One other event I participated in was a "debate" with an ancient alien theorist. It was very peculiar, as you might guess. The way this came about was that Scotty Roberts, the alien astronaut fan, proposed a session on his wacky speculations, and the conference organizers didn't want such lunacy to sail through without a word, so they asked some of the people on the science & skepticism track to engage. Greg Laden and I agreed to sit on a panel with him and another person, with Desiree Schell to moderate. And then I just kind of ignored the prospect until the day of.
Greg Laden met in…
pharyngula | July 2, 2012Mano Singham has discovered a good analysis of the claim that circumcision has health benefits. I agree with it entirely, because I looked at those same papers and came to the same conclusion a year ago! So they must be right.
The analysis points out a few new things I hadn't noticed, in addition to the bad experimental design and the inflated statistics: the results were confounded by the fact that the newly circumcised individuals also got additional counseling about safe sex, and were restricted in their sexual practices by their surgical wounds. It's bad research coming to impractical and…
pharyngula | June 10, 2012I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.
It's genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?
Here's the answer:
ANIMAL PLANET…
pharyngula | April 30, 2012The story so far: Mario Beauregard published a very silly article in Salon, claiming that Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) were proof of life after death, a claim that he attempted to support with a couple of feeble anecdotes. I replied, pointing out that NDEs are delusions, and his anecdotal evidence was not evidence at all. Now Salon has given Beauregard another shot at it, and he has replied with a "rebuttal" to my refutation. You will not be surprised to learn that he has no evidence to add, and his response is simply a predictable rehashing of the same flawed reasoning he has exercised…
pharyngula | April 11, 2012Sometimes, following the path scientific results take as they enter more mass media awareness really is like a game of telephone — you can scarcely recognize the original work in the final summary that ends up in the news media. And sometimes, you find that the scientists contributed to the ghastly mess.
Take a look at this silly story, "Could 'Advanced' Dinosaurs Rule Other Planets?", illustrated with a picture of a T. rex stalking the landscape.
New scientific research raises the possibility that advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs -- monstrous creatures with the intelligence…
pharyngula | March 18, 2012Oh, joy. Senator Tom Harkin will appear in a video message at the Reason Rally. While he may be a lifelong Catholic, as he declares in the announcement, and while he is one of the biggest supporters of acupuncture, chiropracty, herbal and homeopathic 'healing', and all the alt med bullshit he can fling millions of federal funds at, we're apparently supposed to grovel in gratitude that a sitting senator deigns to patronize us atheists.
Why?
This is a man who takes pride in being affiliated with a patriarchal, hierarchical, medieval institution that oppresses women, celebrates poverty, wallows…
pharyngula | March 17, 2012James Inhofe, the ridiculous climate change denier, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and made a series of ridiculous claims. Among them was the claim that those wacky environmentalists were greatly outspending the entire energy industry on propaganda. Wait, what? The top five oil companies made $1 trillion in profits from 2011 through 2011, and somehow the Sierra Club and George Soros and Michael Moore are able to outspend them? Where did such a patently absurd claim come from?
Inhofe revealed his source: the "very liberal publication", Nature (yes, reality really does have a liberal bias)…
pharyngula | February 17, 2012It's really easy to set up a completely fake peer-reviewed journal, which is a great boon to pseudoscientists, quacks, creationists, and con artists. They can be tripped up, though, since they aren't aware of all the inside jokes and strange habits of scientists. Here's one, a journal called "Molecular Biology", that was exposed because they were a little to eager to recruit "editors"…editors who would never be called upon to edit anything, but would just provide a name for window dressing.
I'm delighted to inform you that Peter Uhnemann from the⨠Daniel-Duesentrieb Institute in Germany was…
pharyngula | February 3, 2012The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.
Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the…
pharyngula | February 2, 2012That sad article on gyres as an explanation for everything has had more fallout: not only has it been removed from Science Daily's site, not only has Case Western retracted the press release, but one of the editors at the journal Life has resigned his position over it. The editorial board of the journal was completely surprised by the wretched content of the paper, which is not encouraging; apparently they exercise so little oversight at the journal that they were unaware of the crap their reviewers were passing through. One board member thinks it is a hoax, and laughed at off. Think about…
pharyngula | January 29, 2012The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu 'aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download if you desire. Or you could just read this post, which summarizes entirely the complete content of the short paper, which is pretty much unpublishable and unbelievable anyway.
Here are the holy words.
(Notice that I include the original Arabic so there can…
pharyngula | January 27, 2012Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it's bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn't you immediately sense crankery?
It's also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery…