A ‘professor’ at the far-right wing diploma mill, Judith Reisman, has come out with a bizarre explanation for homosexuality. On Sept. 21, 2012, Texas neurosurgeon Donald L. Hilton Jr., M.D., spoke on pornography addiction and sexual orientation, saying: “Pornography is a visual pheromone, a powerful 100-billion-dollar per year brain drug that is changing sexuality even …
Category Archive: Bad Science
Apr 16 2013
In case you ever doubted that Dr Oz was a quack…
Take a look at the “advertorial” featuring Oz. Just the word “advertorial” should chill you, but there’s more! “Fat-busting”. Seriously, if ever there’s a phrase that should make you recognize that a diet pill is garbage, it’s that one. Then, in the video, Oz promises that this dietary supplement will make you lose weight with …
Apr 16 2013
The Ice Age in the Bible
Every 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 …
Apr 09 2013
The dark side of open access journals?
The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing also uses, …
Mar 23 2013
We need a sociologist of science…or a philosopher
There’s another paper out debunking the ENCODE consortium’s absurd interpretation of their data. ENCODE, you may recall, published a rather controversial paper in which they claimed to have found that 80% of the human genome was ‘functional’ — for an extraordinarily loose definition of function — and further revealed that several of the project leaders …
Mar 22 2013
It’s nice to see someone willing to live by their own advice
All the scientists and naturalists out there crying foul on behalf of the desert need to hang their intellects up for a moment and spend some time in their hearts for a while. I get the best rebuttal yet to my piece taking down Allan Savory’s “green the deserts by filling them with cows” pseudoscience. …
Mar 19 2013
Higgs ain’t god, please stop
Speaking of taking ten steps backward for every step forward in improving the public understanding of science, here’s a name for you: Michio Kaku. Is he trying to become the Dr Oz of physics or something?
Mar 17 2013
Adam Merberg on grazing and Allan Savory and TED
I wish I’d seen Adam Merberg’s excellent takedown of Allan Savory’s TED talk on “greening the deserts” before I wrote my own. Merberg provides a history of Savory’s career that’s remarkably detailed for its relative brevity, with a couple of damning quotes by Savory, including this one: You’ll find the scientific method never discovers anything. …
Mar 15 2013
The Genetic Code is not a synonym for the Bible Code
Oh, 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 …
Mar 15 2013
TED Talk: spreading bullshit about the desert
What? TED vectoring pseudoscience? Unpossible! In one recent particular instance, though, a TED talk firmly grounded in bullshit — literal and figurative — is gaining a mortifying amount of traction with people who really should know better. The lecturer is Allan Savory, who for the last couple decades has been pushing his own brand of …
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