I thought they were going to clean up their act and stop highlighting crackpots and kooks. But oh look: there’s Rupert Sheldrake, listing all the things he finds wrong about science. How could we possibly accept the dogma that matter is unconscious? Or that genetics is measurable and material? What I found particularly galling in …
Category Archive: Bad Science
Mar 04 2013
Ha ha, Harvard!
This year, UMM will have Al Franken as our commencement speaker. Guess who Harvard gets? A comment on the Crimson story got me poking around (I am not a big Oprah watcher) and now I wonder: Did anyone on the Harvard honorary degrees committee consider the fact that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudoscience? …
Mar 01 2013
We are the WEIRD
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, that is. One of the common complaints about evolutionary psychology is that it claims to be addressing evolved human universals, but when you look at the data sets, they are almost always drawn from the same tiny pool of outliers, Western undergraduate students enrolled in psychology programs, and excessively …
Feb 22 2013
ENCODE gets a public reaming
I rarely laugh out loud when reading science papers, but sometimes one comes along that triggers the response automatically. Although, in this case, it wasn’t so much a belly laugh as an evil chortle, and an occasional grim snicker. Dan Graur and his colleagues have written a rebuttal to the claims of the ENCODE research …
Feb 18 2013
Scientific morality: an example
Every once in a while, I hear these stirrings from scientists that there can be an objective morality, and that by following reason and evidence we can achieve great advances in ethics and reduce human suffering. I agree, in part. I think reason and science are the only ways we can implement our goals effectively, …
Feb 14 2013
Note to self: do not trust reviews in the NY Times
John Broder of the NY Times recently reviewed the Tesla Model S electric car, and panned it. Now I know nothing at all about this car; I’m not endorsing or criticizing it myself, and I’m not going to be able to tell you anything about the specs on this vehicle or how well or how …
Feb 13 2013
Sasquatch is ill-served
Melba 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, …
Feb 11 2013
Kate Clancy tackles Evolutionary Psychology
It is a very good and measured response that highlights the flaws in bad evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is trying to take on an incredibly challenging …
Feb 09 2013
You too can be a biolomagist
There’s a 30+-acre solar project proposed for a spot of Joshua tree woodland less that a mile from the house we’re renting here in Joshua Tree — significantly less than a mile — and I went for a walk on the site today. My gut feeling when I heard about the project was that this …
Feb 08 2013
Anil Potti likes to keep his name in the internet spotlight
Anil Potti is the dodgy researcher who, after being found guilty of scientific fraud, hired an online reputation manager to fluff up his name. Then the guy who made stuff up in 18 papers and padded his CV fled to North Dakota, where he’s working in a cancer center…now that’s chilling, isn’t it? His latest …
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