Antiscience

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...