Antiscience

In a new documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson,’’ to be broadcast on P.B.S. on Wednesday night, he is asked whether his views about the relationship between race and intelligence have changed. “ No,’’ Dr. Watson said. “Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic. ’’ Dr. Watson adds that he takes no pleasure in “the difference between blacks and whites’’ and wishes it didn’t exist. “It’s awful, just like it’s awful for schizophrenics,’’ he says. (His son Rufus was diagnosed in his teens with schizophrenia.) Dr. Watson continues: “If the difference exists, we have to ask ourselves, how can we try and make it better? ” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html

The phantom time hypothesis is a historical conspiracy theory asserted by Heribert Illig. First published in 1991, it hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retrospectively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history[1] to legitimize Otto's claim to the Holy Roman Empire. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.[2] According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a "phantom time" of 297 years (AD 614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages. The proposal has been universally rejected by mainstream historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

One slide Dr. Novembre has folded into his recent talks depicts a group of white nationalists chugging milk at a 2017 gathering to draw attention to a genetic trait known to be more common in white people than others — the ability to digest lactose as adults. It also shows a social media post from an account called “Enter The Milk Zone” with a map lifted from a scientific journal article on the trait’s evolutionary history. In most of the world, the article explains, the gene that allows for the digestion of lactose switches off after childhood. But with the arrival of the first cattle herders in Europe some 5,000 years ago, a chance mutation that left it turned on provided enough of a nutritional leg up that nearly all of those who survived eventually carried it. In the post, the link is accompanied by a snippet of hate speech urging individuals of African ancestry to leave America. “If you can’t drink milk,” it says in part, “you have to go back .” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/...

Creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias Pascal Wagner-Egger, Sylvain Delouvée, Nicolas Gauvrit, Sebastian Dieguez DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.072 Teleological thinking — the attribution of purpose and a final cause to natural events and entities — has long been identified as a cognitive hindrance to the acceptance of evolution, yet its association to beliefs other than creationism has not been investigated. Here, we show that conspiracism — the proneness to explain socio-historical events in terms of secret and malevolent conspiracies — is also associated to a teleological bias. Across three correlational studies (N > 2000), we found robust evidence of a teleological link between conspiracism and creationism, which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness. As a resilient ‘default’ component of early cognition, teleological thinking is thus assoc...

The US interior department administers over $5.5bn in funding to external organizations, mostly for research, conservation and land acquisition. At the beginning of 2018, interior secretary Ryan Zinke instated a new requirement that scientific funding above $50,000 must undergo an additional review to ensure expenditures “better align with the administration’s priorities ”. Zinke has signaled that climate change is not one of those priorities: this week, he told Breitbart News that “environmental terrorist groups were responsible for the ongoing wildfires in northern California and, ignoring scientific research on the issue, dismissed the role of climate change. Steve Howke, one of Zinke’s high-school football teammates, oversees this review. Howke’s highest degree is a bachelor’s in business administration. Until Zinke appointed him as an interior department senior adviser to the acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget, Howke had spent his entire career working in ...

FDA is cracking down on unregulated and potentially dangerous natural products sold under the banner of homeopathy. Ars Technica reports: The FDA’s move follows a string of high-profile safety issues with homeopathic products. That includes a years-long investigation by the agency that linked illnesses in 400 infants and the deaths of 10 babies to improperly manufactured homeopathic teething products. In that case, FDA investigators confirmed that the products contained variable and sometimes high levels of toxic belladonna, aka deadly nightshade, which can have harmful and unpredictable effects in infants. With strong-arming, the FDA got the manufacturer, Hyland’s, to recall the products earlier this year. In its announcement Monday, the FDA said that it “continues to find that some homeopathic drugs are manufactured with active ingredients that can create health risks while delivering no proven medical benefits. ” Homeopathy is a centuries-old practice based on unscientific notions ...

Check your theory here first. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

I don't know why this is, but whenever I hear a pseudoscientist invoke the name of Stephen Hawking for any reason, they almost always get his name wrong. It's either Hawkin, Hawkins, or Hawkings; almost never do they get it correct as Hawking. Why? It's a mystery. Perhaps saying it right would burn their tongue. Whenever I do get this email from a crank, wanting me to read his lengthy PDF tome on a new model of physics for the universe, or whatever it is, I reflect on what it was that made him think I was likely to be receptive to it. The answer is obvious: it's the association of the idea of skepticism with the title of the show Skeptoid. He figured that I, as the skeptic, am the adversary of the mainstream and the champion of the maverick, looking to tear down the dark-aged establishment using the radiance of new ideas as my weapon. This is kind of a half-right definition of skepticism. Yes, we do want to shine the light of science on the ideas around us to see what...

Stem cell research is a hot field of science and, according to statistics, also a rather scandal-prone one. Articles in this area are retracted 2.4 times more often than the average for biomedicine, and over half of these retractions are due to fraud. Does the “heat” of stem cell research – the high levels of funding, prestige and media coverage it enjoys – somehow encourage fraud? That’s what our experience of medical research leads us to suspect. While there isn’t enough data to actually prove this, we do have some key indicators. We have, for example, a growing list of scientific celebrities who have committed major stem cell fraud. There is South Korea’s Hwang Woo-suk who, in 2004, falsely claimed to have created the first human embryonic stem cells by means of cloning. A few years ago, Japan’s Haruko Obokata pulled a similar con when she announced to the world a new and simple – and fake – method of turning ordinary body cells into stem cells. Hwang, Obokata and Macchiarini were a...

So, how do you successfully sell that steaming pile of goop? In its latest post, the Goop team wanders through all the steps. I've brought them out and reordered them here for a more coherent interpretation. Step 1. Assure the customer that you are there for them and can care for them—especially when no one else is or can, including the heartless, mainstream medical community. As Goop puts it: Our primary place is in addressing people, women in particular, who are tired of feeling less-than-great, who are looking for solutions—these women are not hypochondriacs, and they should not be dismissed or marginalized. 2. Explain that you just have more answers than those stuffy evidence-based doctors because you look at things from a fresh, holistic perspective. We are drawn to physicians who are interested in both Western and Eastern modalities and incorporate the best from both, as they generally believe that, while traditional medicine can be really good at saving lives, functional med...

China is getting serious about its massive problem with scientific fraud. This brief story in STAT outlines efforts by the Chinese state to impose rigor and punish scientific misconduct, in a typically draconian fashion. This month, in the wake of a fake peer review scandal that claimed 107 papers by Chinese scholars, the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology proclaimed a “no tolerance” policy for research misconduct — although it’s not clear what that might look like. According to the Financial Times, the ministry said the mass retractions “seriously harmed the international reputation of our country’s scientific research and the dignity of Chinese scientists at large. ” But a prior court decision in the country threatened the equivalent of the nuclear option. In April courts approved a new policy calling for stiff prison sentences for researchers who fabricate data in studies that lead to drug approvals. If the misconduct ends up harming people, then the punishment on the tab...

Thanks to antivaxxer idiocy, kids in Minnesota are getting sick. “The outbreak started among Somali Minnesotans who have a low vaccination rate for M.M.R.,” he said, referring to the shot for measles, mumps, rubella. He said the community was “targeted” by members of the anti-vaccination movement, adding that vaccination rates in the community had been as high or even higher than those in the white population, but that began to change in 2008. Members of the community came to believe incorrectly that they had an unusually high rate of autism and that the cases were related to vaccines. But later studies showed that their autism rates were not out of line with those of the state’s white population, he said. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/us/measles-minnesota-vaccines.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=none&state=standard&contentPlacement=2&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.co...

The heart of the book is the story of the Great Terror that struck the scientific establishment in the 1930s. Ings shows that scientists now depended for resources and promotion (but also for physical survival) on the power of patrons such as top leaders like Andrei Zhdanov, or the greatest patron of all, Stalin. He describes the rise of the maliciously cunning but childlike Trofim Lysenko, who notoriously became Stalin’s favorite scientist (though they met only once or twice). As starvation spread in the wake of Stalin’s collectivization, particularly in 1932-33, Lysenko, a semi-educated charlatan, attacked well-known geneticists who were trying to develop new hybrid crops that could solve the problem of low productivity, much of it caused by Stalin’s brutal policies. Fueled by what Ings calls “a huckster’s monomania,” Lysenko claimed he could raise crop yields by his own process, called vernalization, in which artificially induced coldness could fool winter wheat to develop earlier i...

Meet William Happer, high on the list to be Delirium Tremens' chief science advisor. The notoriously reality-biased scientific journal liberal rag Nature reports: Happer, an emeritus professor at Princeton, is no stranger to government: he directed energy research at the US Department of Energy from 1991 to 1993 and is a long-time member of JASON, a US defence advisory group. He is also a well-known critic of mainstream climate science and as such, a frequent target of environmental activists. In 2015, the environmental group Greenpeace UK announced that it had caught Happer in a sting operation. Greenpeace officials, posing as representatives of an unnamed Middle Eastern oil company, offered Happer money to write a report on the benefits of increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 — while keeping the funding source a secret. Happer agreed, and maintains that he did nothing wrong. He says that he told the ‘oil company’ officials that any payments should be sent to the CO2 Coalition, ...

A splendidly horrible press release touts a nematode worm model for teenaged fickleness. Worms and people respond to the smell of the chemical diacetyl, known to humans as “buttered popcorn smell,” which is present in a number of foods, including ones in the C. elegans diet. In fact, the worms have a pair of neurons called AWA dedicated to sensing it. To observe behavioral variation between adult and adolescent worms, the Salk team placed the animals in the center of a dish with a drop of diacetyl on one side, and a neutral odor on the other. Then, in a series of trials over several days, they characterized the paths the worms took. What the scientists saw surprised them: Adolescent worms meandered and took their time getting to the diacetyl, if they got there at all; adult worms made a beeline for it. I hate C. elegans , having spent far too many years trying to teach this microscopic nematode how to do tricks. Press releases like this stretch the bounds of credibility for an organism...

Science denial goes big --- creationist theme park Ark Encounter not only rejects evolution but also electromagnetism (note the non-ROYGBIV rainbow). Originally shared by Peter da Silva Nice rainbow, with red in the middle and green at the end. http://sdgln.com/entertainment/2016/12/22/christian-theme-park-wants-take-back-rainbow

The study was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which has traditionally opposed Dawkins' work. Originally shared by Jeff Green And another well designed study finds just was it was funded to find. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/richard-dawkins-atheism-criticism-atheist-study-rice-university-science-scientists-a7389396.html

Not sure what to make of this one. Paolo Macchiarini, experimental surgeon at Karolinska Institute, is accused of playing extremely loosely with ethical and scientific standards. The studies, involving the implantation of engineered biomaterials to restore tracheal function, have not been retracted but questions remain about the researchers' honesty in evaluating their patients before and after the procedure. Macchiarini lost his job and today it emerged that heads all the way to the top of Swedish biomedical science are rolling. Is this a real scandal or a pretext for housecleaning? http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/another-scathing-report-causes-more-eminent-heads-roll-macchiarini-scandal

Sabine Hossenfelder  writes in Aeon about monetizing interactions with crank mathematicians and physicists. Hossenfelder paints a sympathetic picture of math and physics cranks as well-intentioned but deeply misguided amateurs who have been lead astray by poor science communication. The majority of my callers are the ones who seek advice for an idea they’ve tried to formalise, unsuccessfully, often for a long time. Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry. All of them are men. Many base their theories on images, downloaded or drawn by hand, embedded in long pamphlets. A few use basic equations. Some add videos or applets. Some work with 3D models of Styrofoam, cardboard or wires. The variety of their ideas is bewildering, but these callers have two things in common: they spend an extraordinary amount of time on their theories, and they are frustrated that nobody is interested. .... I still get the occasional joke fro...

Retraction Watch reports on a case of scientific misconduct gone to extremes. http://retractionwatch.com/2016/08/30/former-professor-shoots-dean-who-fired-him-for-misconduct/