Is this getting to be a trend? Critical thinking about a lot of the stuff that tumbles down the pike, claiming to be “science”? First there was Nutrition science is not all its cried up to be, now, Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: The problems with nutrition science begin with how most of its research is conducted. The vast majority of nutrition studies are observational in nature — scientists look at people who eat certain foods and examine how their health compares with the health of people who don’t eat those foods or eat them at different frequencies. But as I reported earlier this year, these sorts of studies have a high chance of being wrong. Very wrong. In 2011, statisticians S. Read More ›

From Digventures: Among the elaborate horses, bulls, bears and hunters, there are some other rather less captivating designs – small geometric motifs, etched onto the walls. Until now, they’ve not received much attention. But as it turns out, these humble designs conceal a much more intriguing mystery. Von Petzinger and her photographer-husband visited 52 caves across Europe recording every instance of these symbols that they could see. They found new, undocumented examples at 75% of the caves they visited, and found the symbols far outnumbered the human and animal images. But the amazing thing was that however many caves they visited, they found the same 32 shapes being used again and again and again. The fact that the same 32 Read More ›

Woit is a skeptical Columbia University mathematician. We like him in part because it is a pleasure to read someone who makes the word “skeptical” mean something concrete and useful, as opposed to the war on common sense and evidence-based reason usually marketed under that name. Anyway, further to Has Nature “got” what is at stake in the string theory controversy?, we see where he writes, with respect to Joseph Conlon’s new book Why String Theory?, The book is explicitly motivated by the desire to answer a lot of the criticism of string theory that has become rather widespread in recent years (wasn’t always so…). For a typical example from the last few days, see Why String Theory is Not Read More ›

From ABC (Australia): Who, or what, is ‘I’? It’s a question that humans have obsessed over for millennia. Philosophers continue to debate whether or not the ‘self’ exists while scientists attempt to define the seemingly indefinable. Well, isn’t it a bit like “pain”? Suppose we said: Philosophers continue to debate whether or not ‘pain’ exists while scientists attempt to define the seemingly indefinable. There is nothing indefinable about pain as far as the sufferer is concerned. But by definition one cannot objectively account for subjectivity – though one can certainly convey to other subjects what it is like. So, doubtless, with “the self.” That said, “The strange science of self” (Olivia Willis and Lynne Malcolm) recounts the case of Graham, Read More ›

From Atlantic: In one study, Stephen Kingsmore at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe found that a quarter of mutations that have been linked to childhood genetic diseases are debatable. In some cases, the claims were based on papers that contained extremely weak evidence. In other cases, the claims were plain wrong: The mutations turned out to be common, like the one in Rehm’s anecdote, and couldn’t possibly cause rare diseases. Of course, people have gotten their kids aborted in the meantime … on the other hand, does that matter these days ? Daniel MacArthur at Massachusetts General Hospital found a similar trend in a study of over 60,000 people, the results of which have been uploaded Read More ›

In 2005, New Scientist listed the placebo effect as Number 1 among 13 things that do not make sense. Now they are trying to figure out how to harness it over there: From New Scientist: How you can harness the placebo effect … “It’s hard to believe that sham surgery can produce a long-lasting effect,” says Luana Colloca, who studies the placebo effect at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. But it can. More. We don’t make this stuff up, you know. If we had that kind of imagination, we’d be getting rich writing screenplays. See also: Royal Society meet on paradigm shift in evolution? Many of the 50 or so scientists associated with The Third Way of Evolution will attend.

From Nature: The structural origin of anomalous properties of liquid water Water is unique in its number of unusual, often called anomalous, properties. When hot it is a normal simple liquid; however, close to ambient temperatures properties, such as the compressibility, begin to deviate and do so increasingly on further cooling. Clearly, these emerging properties are connected to its ability to form up to four well-defined hydrogen bonds allowing for different local structural arrangements. A wealth of new data from various experiments and simulations has recently become available. When taken together they point to a heterogeneous picture with fluctuations between two classes of local structural environments developing on temperature-dependent length scales. More. Incidentally, If water would not behave in this Read More ›

From the Inbox: One of my good memories from grad school days comes from a time in 1968 when I loaded up some fellow students and drove to another campus to spend an afternoon with Leo Kadanoff and take in his colloquium talk. I was impressed by the clarity of his talk and by his easy going manner. He spoke of his work on critical phenomena and described how fluid properties near a critical point could be described by a single parameter – a correlation length. At one point he showed a slide with some experimental data which agreed spectacularly well with the theory over several decades of variation of correlation length, but missed by a little nearest the critical Read More ›

We’ve all heard about Mandelbrot sets – fantastically complex structures that can be created from a single equation and a very short program. Why, some people ask, couldn’t life be like that? And wouldn’t it be more mathematically elegant if it was? Physics types are especially prone to feel this way. Many of them might want to echo Louis IX’s famous remark on the Ptolemaic system, that if the Almighty had consulted him, he could have told Him a simpler way to make the cosmos. I would ask these people to take a good look at the two pictures above. What I’m claiming is that life is not like a Mandelbrot set. It’s like an origami bull. The reason is Read More ›

So Suzan Mazur, author of The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” tells us in Huffington Post: Sir Paul Nurse has just completed his five-year term as president of the Royal Society. The Nobel laureate and molecular biologist has been succeeded by Nobel laureate Sir Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan, who is a structural biologist. But Nurse, who will continue in his role as chief of Francis Crick Institute, has not left the Royal Society without first ensuring that the world’s oldest scientific society remains relevant: a major Royal Society meeting in London has been called for November 7-9, 2016 on evolution paradigm shift with the understated working title, “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Philosophical and Social Science Read More ›

A tribute to his dissertation advisor Leo Kadanoff (1937–2015) from Bill Dembski: I came to know of Leo on a lark, or by providence, depending on one’s view… With dissertations in math, two happy things can happen: (1) an advisor proposes a problem and the student solves it, writes it up, and gets his degree; (2) the student comes up with a problem, solves it, and the advisor deems it worthy of a dissertation. Other things can happen, but they are less happy, such as the inability of solve a problem (whether given by advisor or self-inspired), or solving the problem and then finding out it’s been solved already. From my vantage, it is a credit to Leo and the Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: Understanding how the Christmas spirit works could be a powerful tool in treating the ‘bah humbug’ syndrome. Oh no! Stop them before it’s too late! The world needs more of the Bah! Humbug! Sydrome. The study involved 10 participants who celebrated Christmas, and 10 healthy participants who lived in the same area, but who had no Christmas traditions. All participants were healthy, and did not consume eggnog or gingerbread before the scans. Each participant was scanned while they viewed 84 images with video goggles. … Differences in the brain activation maps from the scans of the two groups were analysed to identify Christmas specific brain activation. Results showed five areas where the Christmas group responded to Christmas Read More ›

So one does not know where information is published, only whether it seems useful? And, above all, whether it survived attempts at replication? It’s good to see so many thinkers putting their heads together about the scandal of peer review. From Nature, Scientists debate the merits of deleting journal names from their publication lists. One UCal biologist, Michael Eisen, has removed the names for his lab’s Web site. Eisen’s move is part of a broader push to assess papers on their own merits. “We have become far too reliant on journal names as a means to evaluate science and scientists,” Eisen said in an interview. After writing about this issue for so long, he “felt it was important to demonstrate Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Mikkel “Rumraket” Rasmussen has written a post critical of Dr. Stephen Meyer, titled, Beating a dead horse (Darwin’s Doubt), which is basically a rehash of comments he made on a thread on Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog last year. The author’s aim is to expose Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “extremely shoddy scholarship,” but as we’ll see, Rasmussen’s own research skills leave a lot to be desired. Did Dr. Meyer fail to document his sources? Rasmussen focuses his attack on chapter 10 of Dr. Meyer’s book, “Darwin’s Doubt.” He writes: Having read the book, a recurring phenomenon is that Meyer time and again makes claims without providing any references for them. Take for instance the claim that the Read More ›

Bacterial resistance is the one most likely to be encountered at a cocktail party.  Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze, soon to be the victim of cocktail buttonholes, offers to explain his approach: Jonathan Wells provides the best possible list of evidence for evolution in his Icons of Evolution (crib sheets) He also disposes of each of these quite handily and shows why they are not pillars of evidence at all. However, in the current world view, I would have to say that bacterial evolution is probably the most solid foundation for evolution in action. Scientists point to the fact of various bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics as clear, unassailable evidence that random mutations occur and that such mutations are sometimes helpful Read More ›