Kooks
pharyngula | January 31, 2016It's easy to find lists of dumb things creationists say, and I'm familiar with that lot, but here's a fun new time-waster: Things Anti-Vaxxers Say. Here's a beautiful example of something I've rarely seen so clearly stated: they get the facts totally wrong, actually the reverse of the actual situation, but nope, that doesn't stop them from inventing a bogus rationalization around them.
You can do your own research but it comes down to chromosomes -- the X chromosome is shaky, and boys have two of them. So they are quite literally twice as likely as girls to be adversely affected by genetic…
pharyngula | August 4, 2015
No, really, they are. Hipster libertarians are the new street mimes, so enjoy them while you can before everyone gets tired of them. The latest example is this silicon valley entrepreneur, Rob Rhineheart, who has written a paean to his lifestyle. It starts with a complaint about the horrors of alternating current.
The walls are buzzing. I know this because I have a magnet implanted in my hand and whenever I reach near an outlet I can feel them. I can feel fortresses of industry miles away burning prehistoric hydrocarbons by the megaton. I can feel the searing pain and loss of consciousness…
pharyngula | December 15, 2014
Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon, has made a bizarre post in which he reveals that he knows nothing about how the brains he cuts up work. Egnor claims that it is impossible for the brain to store memories. Yes, he knows that neural damage can cause loss of memory, that certain delicate areas of the brain, if harmed, can destroy the ability to make new memories, and he waves those awkward facts away to announce that there is simply no way memory or information of any kind can be stored in a meat-organ like a brain. He doesn't say where memories are kept, then, nor does he account for any of the…
pharyngula | November 22, 2014Brandenburg is a physicist who submitted a paper to the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference a few years ago. It's way outside my area of expertise, but it postulated an interesting scenario from the ratios of rare isotopes in the atmosphere of Mars: that there was evidence of a natural nuclear reactor, like Oklo on Earth, that had exploded over 180 million years ago. He makes a good case, at least to this biologist's eyes, and it seems reasonable.
Natural Nuclear Reactors formed and operated on Earth, there is no reason this could not have happened on Mars. Conditions on Mars: lack of…
pharyngula | August 26, 2014The anti-vaxxers are excited. A recent paper, Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data, claims that there is evidence that vaccinations cause autism. Only one problem: it's a crappy paper.
Orac has covered it to an Oracian level of detail, so let me give the short summary:
The author, Brian Hooker, is unqualified. He is trained as a chemical engineer, although he now has a position as a biologist in a nursing program at a Christian college.
The journal, Translational Neurodegeneration, is a new something-or-other with…
pharyngula | June 23, 2014This is an excellent piece on that quack, Dr Oz, by John Oliver. The first 5 minutes is spent mocking the fraud, but then, the last ten minutes are all about the real problem: the evisceration of the FDA's regulatory power over supplements, thanks to Senators Hatch and Harkin.
OK, there is a silly bit at the end where they show that you can pander to your audience without lying to them about the health benefits of magic beans, but still -- let's beef up the FDA, all right?
pharyngula | June 21, 2014Credentialism always makes for convenient excuses. We love to construct simple shortcuts in our cognitive models: someone has a Ph.D., they must be smart (I can tell you that one is wrong). Someone is a scientist, they must have all the right facts. And of course, the converse: we can use the absence of a Ph.D. or professional standing, to dismiss someone.
Creationists are very concerned about this, and you see it over and over again: the desperate need to acquire a degree or title, even if it is from some unaccredited diploma mill or a correspondence school, in order to justify their wacky…
pharyngula | May 26, 2014Yesterday, I attended a discussion led by a philosophy professor after a matinee showing of God's Not Dead. It was a strangely skewed group: about half the attendees were local pastors or wives of pastors. Also, not to my surprise, most of them didn't care for the movie. It was too over the top, it paid short shrift to serious theology, some of the scenes (especially the death scene) made them uncomfortable and wasn't true to how Christians actually respond to death. So that was good. Of course, I had to point out that the caricatures of atheists were also unrepresentative.
One guy wandered…
pharyngula | May 17, 2014We all know about Mike Adams, notorious quack, conspiracy theorist, quantum dork, and raving nutball around here, right? If nothing else, you must have enjoyed Orac's regular deconstruction of his nonsense.
Jon Entine has published a profile of Mike Adams in Forbes magazine that distills all the lunacy down to a relatively concise summary. For instance, it documents his recent public obsessions.
Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being…
pharyngula | April 12, 2014Salon sometimes, and with increasing frequency lately, publishes some genuinely pernicious crap. I notice they've been experimenting with click-baity titles and more lists (I am growing to hate lists on the internet), there is more and more gullible religious pandering, and some days I think they're experience huffpo envy -- 'if only we were a little more schlocky and gossipy and threw in some more T&A, we'd get more traffic!' And now they've published some hysterical nonsense about cell phones causing cancer. Apparently there are no editors on the staff with even the slightest bit of…
pharyngula | January 30, 2014When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they'll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they'll photoshop my head on to it.
Rhawn Joseph's latest struggle: he's suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity…
pharyngula | November 1, 2013He's persistent, I'll say that for him. I first encountered Mark McMenamin as an enthusiastic promoter of Stuart Pivar's inflatable donut model of development. He then sank from sight, along with the pretentious septic tank salesmen, until two years ago, when he presented piles of ichthyosaur vertebrae as evidence that a giant cephalopod, a kraken, had been creating Mesozoic art by arranging the disks into a self portrait.
You may laugh now.
He presented at the Denver GSA meeting this year. Here's his abstract.
THE KRAKEN'S BACK: NEW EVIDENCE REGARDING POSSIBLE CEPHALOPOD ARRANGEMENT OF…
pharyngula | June 25, 2013Gang, don't try this at home. I'm a trained professional, so I can get away with it, although I do face extreme risk of brain damage.
I am reading two books at once. OK, that part isn't too scary, I'm actually just alternating between the two — an hour with one at lunch time, an hour or two with another before bed. I trust you all are able to do this, no problem.
It's the pairing that is the killer. In one corner, I'm reading the marvelously detailed, juicy, thought-provoking The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity by the highly regarded scientists, Erwin and Valentine…
pharyngula | April 18, 2013Graaarh, physicists
I thought physics was the most hubristic scientific discipline of them all, but I may have to revise that assessment. Last week I was sent another of those papers published in archiv, the physics repository, making grand pronouncements about evolution, and I made the mistake of simply dismissing it on twitter — it was simply too ridiculous to post about. But now io9 has picked it up, and more people are clamoring at me to explain it.
Jebus, it's terrible.
Here's what Sharov and Gordon claim:
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests…
pharyngula | April 16, 2013Every time I despair at the dreadful nonsense from the Discovery Institute, I can reliably turn to Answers in Genesis and despair harder. They've just announced that "after two centuries of research", they've finally determined the dates of the Ice Age. They've even announced that they're going to have a chat on their facebook page at 2pm ET today if you really want to learn more. They have figured out the dates of the Ice Age (singular) from reading their Bibles closely.
You might quibble and say that the Bible doesn't say anything about glaciers or ice sheets or changes in climate, so how…
pharyngula | March 28, 2013So you can stop sending me email about it now. Also, dear gob, but I despise the Huffington Post. They've started this recent flurry of publicity for deranged loon Mastropaolo with an awful article on his tired old stunt of announcing a $10,000 prize for a debate — an article in which they blithely consult the Discovery Institute to get their opinion that both evolution and young earth creationism are unproveable assertions that can't be tested by "observable science".
I've known about Mastropaolo for almost 20 years now. He's been on the same worn out horse all that time, doing exactly the…
pharyngula | March 15, 2013Oh, boy. The Intelligent Design creationists are all excited about a new paper that purports to have identified an intelligent signal in the genetic code.
Here's a new paper that can be added to the growing stack of intelligent-design articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even though the authors do not use the phrase "intelligent design," their reasoning centers on the detection of an intelligent signal embedded in the genetic code -- a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by a natural cause, "be it Darwinian, Lamarckian," chemical affinities or energetics, or any…
pharyngula | February 19, 2013The baseball player Jose Canseco made a remarkable series of tweets yesterday.
I may not be 100% right but think about it. How else could 30 foot leather birds fly?The land was farther away from the core and had much less gravity so bigness could develop and dominateMy theory is the core of the planet shifted when single continent formed to keep us in a balanced spinGravity had to be weaker to make dinosaurs nimbleAnimal tissue of muscles and ligaments could not support huge dinosaurs even standing up or pump blood up 60 foot neckselephants today eight tons supersaurs two hundred tons a…
pharyngula | February 13, 2013Melba Ketchum issued a press release announcing that she had sequenced Sasquatch DNA. That was back in November.
It stalled out at that point. It turns out the paper couldn't get past peer review, and no one was going to publish it. We're all heartbroken, I know.
But now she has overcome all the obstacles, and it's finally in print! You can read the abstract.
One hundred eleven samples of blood, tissue, hair, and other types of specimens were studied, characterized and hypothesized to be obtained from elusive hominins in North America commonly referred to as Sasquatch. DNA was extracted and…
pharyngula | January 17, 2013It's all Matt Dillahunty's fault. He tells me he's carrying on a correspondence with some guy who claims to have an alternative theory of evolution, and asks me to help him wade through the gobbledygook…so I did. I just didn't realize how much gobbledygook there was.
The guy is named Eugene McCarthy, and he calls his alternative "Stabilization Theory". Apparently he does have some scientific background and has studied hybrids in birds; the problem is that now he sees everything in terms of species hybrids. And I mean everything. I downloaded his book — it's free — and skimmed through all 400…