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Biology Clinical trials Evolution Medicine Physics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious? (revisited)

Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained […]

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Intelligent design/creationism Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

This guy is a veritable modern Copernicus by press release

After you’ve been blogging as long as I have, you inevitably wind up on a lot of mailing lists. Publicity companies, for instance, long ago discovered that getting a buzz going in the blogosphere is every bit as important as trying to get coverage from the “traditional” media. If you’re as fortunate as I’ve been […]

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Biology Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science

The Chicago Tribune, “chronic Lyme disease,” and demands for false balance

During the six years of its existence, one frequent complaint I’ve had on this blog, it’s been about how the press covers various health issues. In particular, it’s depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones or powerlines cause cancer, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Who are the Terminator cranks?

As a part of a longer post where I was, for the most part, serious albeit sarcastic, I asked one question that I considered a bit of a throwaway joke. Oddly enough, the more I think about it, the more I think that it wasn’t such a joke. Here was my question: Perhaps we could […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Removing science from anthropology: Parallels with medicine

I don’t recall if I ever mentioned this before, but back when I was in college I had quite the interest in a couple of sciences that you might not have expected or guessed at, namely anthropology and archaelogy. Indeed, an archeology class that I took as a senior was one of the most memorable […]